Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/314937888?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Tuesday, June 25, 2013
'Bing for Schools' tailors Microsoft's search engine to K-12, cuts ads and filters adult content
Bing is headed to the classroom in a more targeted form, with Redmond announcing this morning a new version of the engine dubbed "Bing for Schools." The initiative takes the standard Bing search engine and cuts all adverts in search, filters "adult content" (the specifications of that are murky) adds more privacy protection, and adds "specialized learning features to enhance digital literacy." Schools can opt in on a per-case basis, and if they do, that will enable the specialized version of Bing on an entire school's network. The program's kicking off "later this year," and interested parties can put their name in the hat right here. Should you like to see the full note introducing Bing for Schools from Microsoft's Bing Behavioral Scientist Matt Wallaert, we've dropped it just beyond the break.
Filed under: Internet, Software, Microsoft
Source: Microsoft, Bing for Schools
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/PBq3SOb0DTs/
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Parents who sued Apple over in-app purchases can now claim compensation
Apple's dedicated "in-app purchases litigation administrator" has had a busy few days. According to CNET, he or she has been emailing some important news to the 23 million parents who've been involved in a long-running class action lawsuit over in-app purchases racked up by their kids. The email says that individual claims for compensation can now be sent to Cupertino as per the terms of the original settlement back in February. Disputed transactions under $30 will qualify for a nominal $5 iTunes voucher, while bigger bills may be fully refunded in cash -- but only for strings of purchases made within 45 days of each other, back when there were no repeat password requests or disclaimers to get in a seven-year-old's way. There's a deadline of January 13th, 2014 for at least some types of claim, by which point Apple's litigation administrator may well find themselves diverted to another urgent case.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile, Apple
Source: CNET
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/IW3KwlLpXe4/
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Pfizer says shareholders snap up remaining Zoetis shares
(Reuters) - Pfizer Inc
The company said it would distribute all Zoetis Class A common stock, representing more than 80 percent of all of the unit's shares, to investors who tendered required shares of Pfizer stock. As a result, Pfizer said it no longer would hold any ownership interest in Zoetis.
With Zoetis fully divested, Pfizer said it expected full-year earnings, excluding special items, of $2.10 to $2.20 per share. That is below its previous forecast of $2.14 to $2.24.
The exchange offer of 0.9898 Zoetis share for each Pfizer common share expired on Friday. In effect, Pfizer accepted more than 405 million of its shares in return for almost 401 million Zoetis shares that it owned.
The company said it expected to complete the exchange on Wednesday.
Pfizer projected 2013 revenue of $50.8 billion to $52.8 billion, down from its earlier forecast of $55.3 billion to $57.3 billion.
But the drugmaker said it still expected the Zoetis spinoff to boost its earnings in 2014.
Shares of Pfizer were down 1 percent at $28.17 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange, amid a 1.7 percent decline for the Arca Pharmecaceutical Index <.drg> of large U.S. and European drugmakers.
(Reporting by Ransdell Pierson; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Lisa Von Ahn)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pfizer-says-shareholders-snap-remaining-zoetis-shares-142837716.html
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Reinventing The Games Console Half Way Won't Work - TechCrunch
Editor?s note:?Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer, creator of leading game design blog?What Games Are?and creative director of Jawfish Games. You can follow him on Twitter?here.
In some ways you?ve got to feel bad for Microsoft. The company has spent years trying to find ways to expand its Xbox idea. It put together a very interesting camera peripheral that many people bought into, but not too many games. It?s tried, on several occasions, to use the games console as a way to win access into the living room. Yet now it?s at the point of having to roll back many of its big ideas because the market reacted so negatively. The company has run into a hard truth: In the minds of the market ?console? means something specific, and is not inclined to expand its thinking.
In essence what Microsoft wanted to do was similar to what Apple did for phones. Long before iPhones there were many years of terrible feature phones. They had Java games, shambolic web interfaces and data plans that charged per megabyte. They?stuck resolutely to sticky keys and small screens, and at best some of them had styluses that pretended to be able to recognize handwriting.?Apple managed to leapfrog that mess by reinventing how it controlled, how it looked and what it felt like. Mobile phones went from being cellular devices to something else, something with sexy touch-screen effects and whatnot, and that in turn opened the door to many other innovations.
That, in essence, was Microsoft?s big idea with Kinect. If the company could redefine control to be much broader than stuffy old joypads, then that opened the door to lots of other avenues. In a sense it was trying to take ?console? into the realm of ?smartconsole? but it had an unwillingness to really go for that. Like Sony and Sega before it, Microsoft has attempted to achieve its vision by expanding the metaphor of what ?console? is supposed to mean rather than defining a new type of product from the ground up. And the market has yet again said no.
Unlike in the computing space where one machine acts as arbiter and translator of all content toward multiple screens, the living room has never really been able to unify. We have several smaller devices that all plug into one big screen. And often they have duplicate functions.?The games console seems like it should solve that. It should be a point of access for content and functionality, roles already filled by computers but in the living room.?So much more could be brought to the living room?if only the audience would get behind that idea. Throw out all your confusing boxes, it seems to say. Bring back some sanity to your life. One box to rule them all and make your life elegant.
Yet no company can really get there. No one company can strike deals with all cable-box makers to essentially cut them out of a key part of their value chain. Nobody is yet able to convince television manufacturers to get behind one standard control method. And since that means there will always be fragmentation,?players really just want consoles to play games. They view consoles as essentially gaming CD players, and preferably cheap ones at that, and steadfastly refuse to buy into the bigger picture.
Their resistance is with good reason:?Transitioning from cheaper many-box to expensive one-box means giving up a lot. It means forfeiting the chance to play games on other systems. It means disconnecting from a pre-existing media service and converting or dumping a lot of material in the process. (Could you ever see iTunes on your Xbox?) The argument has not yet been made strongly enough to the market that the trade-off is worth doing. While smartphones show that dramatic evolution is possible,?a platform holder like Microsoft needs to go much further than it already has if it?s going to change how gamers think.
Several commenters have lamented that Microsoft?s recent reversal on DRM is caused by players being short-sighted, putting immediate value (used games) ahead of long-term potential gains (digital connectedness). To me this reflects a key dissonance.?It?s rare that the market gets educated, and instead much more common that it gets fixated on an idea of what a product category is. It hears ?PC? and it thinks ?powerful desktop computer.? It hears ?console? and it thinks ?shiny games deck.? It sees one sort of trying to act like the other and resists. No no, it says. The device is supposed to be like this.
Even though every PC, smartphone and tablet in the world has a front-facing camera, for example, the market finds something weird about consoles doing likewise because that doesn?t seem to add much to what it believes??shiny games deck? is supposed to be. Even though Nintendo has a great idea for how second screen gaming could work, the market fundamentally regards it askance. A shiny games deck is supposed to be about joypads and such. The tribe only understands ?console? as one thing and is only really interested in features that bolster that vision. All else is viewed with suspicion.
There?s some kind of smart-TV idea trying to be born at Microsoft, an interesting technology which seems just out of reach. There?s something to its Minority-Report-esque idea of swiping, swishing and talking to your television. There?s some notion in the middle of that with tablets and interactions and second screens.?But to get there needs a deep reinvention, and the road toward it does not lead through changing everyone?s minds about the meaning of ?console.? Instead it needs to be a new product, even a whole new category, and its adoption has to go slow.
Rather than adapting a product into something that is complicated, confusing and suspicious, the right approach would be to create something new. One example would be a Kinect standard that could be licensed to television makers and integrated into sets. A standalone camera, irrespective of gaming, that perhaps makes all sorts of remote control tasks easier. And not called ?Xbox? at all. Not called ?console? either.?Or, if the vision mandates that gaming still be involved, a gaming deck that gets beyond the joypad.
Much as the iPhone managed to sell itself by walking away from keypads, arguably the gaming machine that moves beyond ?console? as a product category needs to move beyond the joypad. This is very hard to do. Nintendo almost managed it with Wii before running out of steam and then trying to create a joypad/tablet combo that few people really like.?Kinect tried too, but gestural games are somewhat limited in their scope. Perhaps through SmartGlass or some haptic variant of that in combination with Kinect, Microsoft could get us all into the idea of a new product category like ?smartconsole.?
Or maybe the reason that this product struggles to come to life is simply that there is no place for it. There isn?t anything fundamentally wrong with the games console as a device.?If you like to shoot stuff, jump on platforms, race, and play sports or roleplaying games, the console form factor that we have right now does that. All of the sector?s problems are about how it runs as a business rather than a form factor (which is why microconsoles are a big deal, as they primarily innovate on the business).?Much like the computer or the car, the form factor for doing all those things has not significantly changed in 30 years ? and there?s precious little need for them to.
Blaming the market is all well and good, but there?s no reason for it to change its idea about what a games console is.?And that?s a hard truth. That?s the sort of truth that makes games executives depressed. That?s the kind of truth that, after years of working on grand visions game makers often realize (and become bitter about) that they have to lower themselves back down into the muck. Rather than change the fundamentals the market consistently tells game makers to lean in. Make it bigger. Make it better. Make it play well. Make it feel right. Make it cool. Make it, you know, a great game. That?s all the gaming market cares about, and as yet no one?s made a compelling case for it to think differently.
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/23/reinventing-the-console/
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Documents show IRS also screened liberal groups
WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Internal Revenue Service's screening of groups seeking tax-exempt status was broader and lasted longer than has been previously disclosed, the new head of the agency acknowledged Monday. Terms including "Israel," ''Progressive" and "Occupy" were used by agency workers to help pick groups for closer examination, according to an internal IRS document obtained by The Associated Press.
The IRS has been under fire since last month after admitting it targeted tea party and other conservative groups that wanted the tax-exempt designation for tough examinations. While investigators have said that agency screening for those groups had stopped in May 2012, Monday's revelations made it clear that screening for other kinds of organizations continued until earlier this month, when the agency's new chief, Danny Werfel, says he discovered it and ordered it halted.
The IRS document said an investigation into why specific terms were included was still underway. It blamed the continued use of inappropriate criteria by screeners on "a lapse in judgment" by the agency's former top officials. The document did not name the officials, but many top leaders have been replaced.
Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee released 15 lists of terms that the IRS agency used and has provided to congressional investigators. Some of the lists, which evolved over time, used the terms "Progressive" and "Tea Party" and others including "Medical Marijuana," ''Occupied Territory Advocacy," ''Healthcare legislation," ''Newspaper Entities" and "Paying National Debt."
The lists were dated between August 2010 and April 2013 ? the month before the IRS targeting of conservative groups was revealed. They ranged from 11 pages to 17 pages but were heavily blacked out to protect sensitive taxpayer information.
Neither the IRS document obtained by the AP or the 15 IRS lists of terms addressed how many progressive groups received close scrutiny or how the agency treated their requests. Dozens of conservative groups saw their applications experience lengthy delays, and they received unusually intrusive questions about their donors and other details that agency officials have conceded were inappropriate.
In a conference call with reporters, Werfel said that after becoming acting IRS chief last month, he discovered varied and improper terms on the lists and said screeners were still using them.
He did not specify what terms were on the lists, but said he suspended the use of all such lists immediately. Lists from April 2013 that were released included the terms "Paying National Debt" and "Green Energy Organizations."
"There was a wide-ranging set of categories and cases that spanned a broad spectrum" on the lists, Werfel said. He added that his aides found those lists contained "inappropriate criteria that was in use."
Werfel ordered a halt in the use of spreadsheets listing the terms ? called BOLO lists for "be on the lookout for? on June 12 and formalized their suspension with a June 20 written order, according to the IRS document the AP obtained. Investigators have previously said that the lists evolved over time as screeners found new names and phrases to help them identify groups to examine.
Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee released one of the lists, dated November 2010, that the IRS has provided to congressional investigators. That 16-page document, with many parts blacked out, shows that the terms "Progressive" and "Tea Party" were both on that list, as well as "Medical Marijuana," ''occupied territory advocacy" and "Healthcare legislation."
Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan, top Democrat on the Ways and Means panel, said he was writing a letter to J. Russell George, the Treasury Department inspector general whose audit in May detailed IRS targeting of conservatives, asking why his report did not mention other groups that were targeted.
"The audit served as the basis and impetus for a wide range of congressional investigations and this new information shows that the foundation of those investigations is flawed in a fundamental way," Levin said.
Republicans said there was a distinction. A statement by the GOP staff of House Ways and Means said, "It is one thing to flag a group, it is quite another to repeatedly target and abuse conservative groups."
George's report criticized the IRS for using "inappropriate criteria" to identify tea party and other conservative groups. It did not mention more liberal organizations, but in response to questions from lawmakers at congressional hearings, George said he had recently found other lists that raised concerns about other "political factors" he did not specify.
On Monday, Karen Kraushaar, a spokeswoman for the inspector general, said their May audit focused on terms the IRS used to pick cases to be studied for political campaign activity, which might disqualify a group from tax-exempt status.
She said the inspector general has since found other "criteria" the agency used to list potential cases, and "we are reviewing whether these criteria led to expanded scrutiny for other reasons and why these criteria were implemented."
Democratic staff on Ways and Means said in a press release that they had verified that of the 298 groups seeking tax-exempt status that George's audit had examined, some were liberal organizations ? something George's report did not mention.
Many organizations seeking tax-exempt designation were applying for so-called 501(c)(4) status, named for its section of the federal revenue code. IRS regulations allow that status for groups mostly involved in "social welfare" and that don't engage in election campaigns for or against candidates as their "primary" activity, and it is up to the IRS to judge whether applicants meet those vaguely defined requirements.
Werfel's remarks came as he released an 83-page examination he has conducted of his embattled agency. The conclusions, which Werfel cautioned are preliminary, have so far found there was "insufficient action" by IRS managers to prevent and disclose the problem involving the screening of certain groups, but no specific clues of misconduct.
"We have not found evidence of intentional wrongdoing by anyone in the IRS or involvement in these matters by anyone outside the IRS," he told reporters.
The report found no indication so far of improper screening beyond the IRS offices, mostly in Cincinnati, that examine groups seeking tax-exempt status.
Werfel's report describes several new procedures the agency is installing to prevent unfair treatment of taxpayers in the future. They include a fast-track process for groups seeking tax-exempt status that have yet to get a response from the IRS within 120 days of applying. He is also creating an Accountability Review Board, which within 60 days is supposed to recommend any additional personnel moves "to hold accountable those responsible" for the targeting of conservative groups, Werfel's report said.
The top five people in the agency responsible for the tax-exempt status of organizations have already been removed, including the former acting commissioner, Steven Miller, whom President Barack Obama replaced with Werfel.
"The IRS is committed to correcting its mistakes, holding individuals accountable as appropriate" and establishing new controls to reduce potential future problems, Werfel told reporters.
IRS screening of conservative groups had sparked investigations by three congressional committees, the Justice Department and a Treasury Department inspector general.
Werfel's comments and report drew negative reviews from one of the IRS's chief critics in Congress, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Issa said the review "fails to meaningfully answer the largest outstanding questions about inappropriate inquiries and indefensible delays. As investigations by Congress and the Justice Department are still ongoing, Mr. Werfel's assertion that he has found no evidence that anyone at IRS intentionally did anything wrong can only be called premature."
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., whose panel is also investigating the agency, said the IRS "still needs to provide clear answers to the most significant questions ? who started this practice, why was it allowed to continue for so long, and how widespread was it? This culture of political discrimination and intimidation goes far beyond basic management failure and personnel changes alone won't fix a broken IRS."
Werfel had promised to produce a report within a month of taking over the agency.
Werfel said he briefed Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew on the report earlier Monday.
Werfel, initially named the IRS's acting commissioner, is now the agency's deputy principal commissioner because federal law limits the time an agency can be led by an acting official.
___
Associated Press writers Stephen Ohlemacher and Henry C. Jackson contributed to this report.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/documents-show-irs-screened-liberal-groups-224239890.html
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