The cheapest plan for family will cost $20,000 per year.
American families will be forced to buy conventional health insurance that primarily benefits the pharmaceutical industry under Obamacare. By 2016 the cheapest health insurance plan available will cost a typical American family $20,000 a year, according to the IRS.
Continue reading… “Obamacare will cost the average American family $20,000 a year: IRS”
“These growing inquiries can have a serious chilling effect on free expression – and real privacy implications.”
The Government wants more of your data, but copyright holders are getting slightly less active in requesting tweettakedowns. The social/news/media network published its second Twitter Transparency Report today in conjunction with #DataPrivacyDay. Twitter’s goal is to be open about revealing how many government requests it gets for user information and DMCA copyright takedowns. Its first Transparency Report was published seven months ago, in July.
Continue reading… “U.S. is the most data hungry country according to Twitter’s Transparency Report”
A religious circumcision.
The Bundestag hurriedly passed some strange new legislation last month: the “Circumcision Law.” The law guarantees the right for parents to have their children circumcised. This was the government’s answer to a passionate and uncomfortable five-month debate over the practice, in which religious minorities and their supporters clashed with a cabal of doctors and politicians over tolerance versus children’s rights.
Saudi King Abdullah
Thirty women were appointed to the previously all-male consultative Shura Council by Saudi King Abdullah in decrees published on Friday, marking a historic first as he pushes reforms in the ultra-conservative kingdom.
Continue reading… “Saudi King appoints 30 women to advisory council in historic first”
An internet cafe in Tehran.
Iran has an intense relationship with the internet. The country has made many attempts to curtail its citizens’ use of social media. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in May, issued a fatwa against anti-filtering tools that have helped citizens to access blocked material on the Internet. In December, they launched Mehr, its own version of YouTube, which allows users to upload and view content they create, and to watch videos from IRIB, Iran’s national broadcaster. They have also been building a national intranet – a government-run network that would operate “largely isolated” from the rest of the World Wide Web. Reporters Without Borders named Iran to its 2012 “Enemies of the Internet” list with Iran’s intensified online crackdowns, increased digital surveillance of citizens, and the imprisonment of web activists.
Continue reading… “Iran’s ‘smart’ approach to censorship of the internet”
The black boxes will be able to record all sorts of information about a vehicle.
The National Transportation Safety Agency is proposing that all new automobiles sold in the US after September of 2014 will be required to be equipped with event data recorders. The recorders are somewhat like the black boxes that are found inside aircraft.
Continue reading… “NTSA wants black boxes in cars in 2014”
Vint Cerf, inventor of the Internet Protocol [IP] and Transmission Control Protocol [TCP].
One of the two or three people who can rightly claim to have invented the internet is Vint Cerf. He is now worried about its survival.
Cerf is specifically concerned about the World Conference on International Telecommunications, happening now through December 14 in Dubai. At this meeting, for the first time since 1988, the countries of the world will gather to try and update international agreements on how to handle data, voice, and other communications technologies. (Video)
Continue reading… “Internet inventor, Vint Cerf, worried about its survival”
NASA launches Big Data Challenge Series
NASA along with a couple other government agencies have kicked off a series of TopCoder challenges designed to find innovative solutions to the government’s big data problems. The first contest is all about making disparate, incompatible data sets usable and actually valuable across agencies.
Continue reading… “NASA launches Big Data Challenge”
Suneet Tuli with the Aakash 2 tablet.
The 44-year-old CEO of UK/Canadian/Indian startup Datawind, Suneet Tuli, is having a taxing day. He says he is “underwater” as he struggles to find a cell signal outside a restaurant in Mumbai. On Sunday Nov. 11, the president of India, Pranab Mukherjee, will unveil the seven-inch Aakash 2 tablet computer Tuli’s company is selling to the government for distribution to 100,000 university students and professors. (If things go well, the government plans to order as many as 5.86 million.) In the meantime, Tuli is deluged with calls from reporters, and every day his company receives thousands of new orders for the commercial version of the Aakash 2. Already, he’s facing a backlog of four million unfulfilled pre-orders.
Continue reading… “Aakash 2 – The $20 tablet that could transform computing as we know it”
Obama’s data crunchers.
The backroom data crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed last spring that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.
Continue reading… “The data crunchers who helped Obama win the election”
The process of getting a visa is slow, expensive, time-consuming, and often unsuccessful.
It seemed like all of the stars were aligning for Jay Meattle in early 2010. He had raised several hundred thousand dollars from investors in Boston for his start-up, Shareaholic. And the company, which enables people to easily share online content they find interesting, had just passed the milestone of 1 million users.
Tianhe 1A supercomputer
What’s expected to be the world’s fastest supercomputer at 20 petaflops (peak performance) was launched by the U.S. China has announced it is building a machine intended to be five times faster when it is deployed in 2015, IT World reports.
Continue reading… “China plans to build a 100-petaflops supercomputer by 2015”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.