Hasta La Gadget!

The Senate rejected a move to restore lower interest rates on some new federal student loans on Tuesday. Forty-nine senators voted against the bill.

On July 1, following congressional inaction, the rates on some new loans doubled from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. This was the first effort to reverse that spike, which is expected to hit about 7 million students returning to college in the fall with an extra $2,600 increase in their payments.

Below, the Twitter and Facebook contact information of every senator who voted “nay” on the measure to lower student loan rates. (Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) also voted “nay,” but did so for procedural reasons, so that he could enter a motion to reconsider the vote at a later point):

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We’ve heard many, many times that Jack Gleeson, who plays cruel boy king Joffrey Baratheon on “Game of Thrones,” is one of the nicest people his co-stars have ever met. And though Sophie Turner’s (Sansa Stark) story about Gleeson’s Winnie the Pooh rap “Got Monies and Honies” had us nearly convinced, a new Vine video from user Manus (below) is the ultimate evidence that the young actor is actually a softie.

Below, watch Gleeson, a regular ol’ student at Trinity College in Dublin, kissing, cuddling and getting his ear nibbled on by an adorable puppy.

You will never look at Joffrey the same way again.

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Plug just launched a Kickstarter campaign for its $69 adapter. It will transform your USB drives into a personal Dropbox for all your devices. Thanks to a deep integration in your filesystem, you won’t have to move your files to a special folder or a virtual hard drive. After launching Plug’s app, everything is transparent and you won’t have to change your workflow. Except that all your devices will now have the same files.

Very much like TechCrunch Disrupt alumni Bitcasa, you can cache some folders and files on your local hard drive or stream them from Plug. The only limit in Plug’s case is the amount of storage space you have on your USB drives.

Behind the scene, Plug is a small Linux-based machine that creates a VPN network. Then, if you want to access your files from your iPhone, Plug’s client will silently connect to the network and show you all your files. It looks a lot like Dropbox’s app, except that your files are stored at home and you don’t pay a subscription fee. You could say that it’s pretty similar to a network-attached storage device, but with a software trick to replace your entire filesystem.

“Our innovation with Plug is a software innovation more than a hardware innovation,” co-founder and CEO Séverin Marcombes told me. “We could have designed this system in the cloud if it weren’t so expensive and so slow,” he continued.

After launching the app, all your files will go through Plug. With a USB 2.0 connector and an Ethernet 100 port, it could be a bit slow to stream movies, especially if you have multiple drives plugged into the adapter. That’s why you can cache your files. Even though Plug claims that you can use your files just the way you used to do, this new paradigm will probably take some time before getting used to it. Marcombes compared the caching feature with Spotify’s offline playlist feature, a button that Spotify users already know well.

The Kickstarter campaign just started but its goal is pretty low. At $69,000, the Paris-based team will certainly attract a thousand backers to reach its goal. You’ll just have to wait until December before getting your hands on the device.

This week it’s becoming clear that the company that set its sights on a single machine to turn around fortunes through the 2013 smartphone season will be bringing an HTC One reboot by the end of the year. It’s not a solid announcement, of course, and HTC isn’t saying so officially quite yet, but in addition to a reboot of the One that’s lead the way through the past bunch of months, the company is being tipped to bring an HTC M8 to the public in 2014.

The original HTC One works with code-name HTC M7, making the M8 a next-generation release. With the HTC One on its own, the company is being suggested as bringing a new generation with incremental updates to hardware and software while the M8 will hold all the biggest tricks. A source speaking with Pocket Lint on the matter has given a rather cryptic “plans could be changed” on said two-tiered release.

The HTC M8 is suggested to be bringing on a next-generation processor and a display somewhere in-between the HTC One and the DROID DNA (aka the Butterfly J). You’ll also find the Butterfly S to be a good indicator of the updates that’ll be made to the HTC One, it bringing on a slightly more impressive display along with HTC One-centric hardware improvements like forward-facing BoomSound speakers.

The HTC One Mini also lurks in the shadows, that being a smaller version of the HTC One with similar specifications aimed at hands with a slightly smaller grip than the massive beasts that are the HTC One and DROID DNA. This release will likely come during or soon after the release of the Verizon version of the HTC One.

The HTC One carried by Verizon has indeed been confirmed by Verizon, finally, and will likely be brought to the market by the end of next month. This is indicated by FCC listings appearing earlier this week.

VIA: Android Community

HTC One 2 “M8″ expected as 2014 flagship smartphone is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
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It’s not often that we get to witness aviation history being made, but when we do, it’s often awesome. Such is the case with the U.S. Navy’s X-47B which just became the first unmanned aircraft to land on an aircraft carrier.

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