Hasta La Gadget!

Do you love the Windows Phone 8.1 operating system over the other two mainstream players, namely Android and iOS? If so, you would most probably be rocking to a Nokia Lumia handset, or you could be one of the rare few who are carrying a Samsung ATIV device that runs on the Windows Phone platform. Having said that, you would be pleased as punch to hear that Samsung has updated their ATIV Camera app for its Windows Phone 8.1 handsets, where it has already appeared on the Windows Phone Store as a test submission.

Do expect a fair number of new features that will arrive on the rear camera with this particular app update, where they will include Auto, Beauty Face, Best Photo, Best Face, Rich Tone (HDR), Eraser, and Night Shot. The video features will also allow one to grab a still shot from video so that you have an alternative to capture a shot from a different angle, Smooth motion and Slow motion.

Considering how the app itself will target Windows Phone 8.1-powered models only, one will have to wait until a new firmware update from Samsung is introduced before the actual Windows Phone 8.1 update. Do expect the likes of the Samsung ATIV S, Samsung ATIV SE, and the Samsung ATIV S Neo to be on the receiving end of this latest update.

Samsung ATIV Camera App For Windows Phone 8.1 Gets HDR , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

When it comes to Android-powered tablets, there are dime a dozen models to choose from, although Nexus 7 (2013 model) does continue to hold its own in many aspects despite being close to a year old. It is refreshing to enjoy a stock Android experience, that is for sure, not to mention sporting a physical form factor that is a snap to tote around. Well, if you are still waiting to pick up a new tablet and do not know which model to choose from, perhaps the Nexus 7 will fit the bill perfectly.

Now, don’t go picking up the 2012 Nexus 7 model here. The latest Nexus 7 from the Google Play store will bring along with it a treat, where you will be able to enjoy another three more months of Google Play Music All Access for free, now how about that? Once the three months are over, and you are hooked and well pleased with the service, it will be made available to you at $9.99 each month.

As for the price of the Nexus 7 on the Google Play store itself, the 16GB Wi-Fi model will cost $229 a pop, while the 32GB Wi-Fi model is a wee bit more expensive at $269, offering good value for money, while those who want the LTE version with 32GB of internal memory will have to pony up $349, where you can choose from an unlocked, AT&T or T-Mobile model.

Nexus 7 With 3 Months Of Unlimited Music Via Google Play Purchase , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

The White House is holding a summit Monday, June 23 on working families. The summit is intended to call attention to the fact that President Obama wants to raise wages and job opportunities for working Americans, especially for working women. This is a welcome initiative, though there is a great deal that the President could do by executive order without waiting for a deadlocked Congress to act.

The grotesque income inequality in our economy has at last some in for some overdue attention. For the vast majority of working Americans, there is only one source of income — wages and salaries.

Since the late 1970s, earnings for most working people have been flat, while the economy’s productivity and the pay of corporate and financial industry executives has soared. The pattern only worsened after 2000.

Trends that were unacceptable long before the financial collapse of 2008 have intensified in five years of a feeble recovery. About 95 percent of the economy’s income gains during the past three years have gone to the top one percent.

Though higher minimum wages, more social supports and a far more progressive tax code would help, the deeper problem is the structure of wages and salaries. We can never redistribute enough income to compensate for a power shift that has allowed corporate America to systematically underpay its workers.

One of the tricks that corporations use to batter down wages is to contract out work, so that the true employer is not accountable to its workforce. What is shocking is that the most influential employer that resorts to this device is none other than the federal government.

At landmark federal buildings such as the Pentagon, the several museums operated by the Smithsonian and the Ronald Reagan World Trade Center, food and janitorial workers nominally employed by private contractors are paid poverty wages. Some two million such workers are ultimately working for the federal government, through intermediary contractors on construction sites, in concessions at national parks, government installations, the medical-industrial complex, and other employers ultimately paid with taxpayer dollars.

According to a new report, “Underwriting Good Jobs,” by my colleagues at Demos, about eight million U.S. workers are in substandard jobs financed by about $1.3 trillion in federal contracts for goods and services. The Demos report calls for the Federal government to lead the way back to a high wage economy by demanding that all of its contractors respect workers’ rights to bargain collectively; provide living wages and good benefits including paid family leave and predictable work schedules; comply with all federal workplace laws and protections; and limit executive pay to 50 times the median salary paid to employees.

All told, the federal contractor workforce accounts for about nine percent of GDP. Amazingly, there are large numbers of workers on federal contracts whose wages are so low that they qualify for food stamps, Medicaid, and other safety-net protections financed by taxpayers. In effect, one arm of the federal government saves money by allowing its contractors to underpay employees while other parts of the government subsidize the private contractors and the income shortfall through transfer payments to the same workers.

Presidents dating back to Martin van Buren in 1840 have used the government’s contracting power to improve worker treatment by private corporations. During World War II, if a corporation had a war production contract, it had to respect the right of its workers to organize or join a union. That order, issued by President Franklin Roosevelt, even more than the 1935 Wagner Act, enabled unions to raise standards throughout industrial America.

And in the early 1960s, when Congress was deadlocked on civil rights legislation, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson issued executive orders requiring corporations that bid on federal contacts to cease racial discrimination in hiring and promotion, and to take affirmative action to overcome the present effects of past discrimination.

President Obama has declared that with Congress unwilling to raise the federal minimum wage or to move to reform collective bargaining rights, he will use his executive authority to raise living standards. He made a start by issuing an order requiring all government contractors to pay their workers at least $10.10 an hour, the proposed increase in the general minimum wage backed by Obama but blocked by Republicans in Congress.

But Obama could do a great deal more. Private employers that profit from government contracts should not just do the bare minimum. The government has the authority to demand that they be exemplary employers, if the president chooses to use that power — in all employment affected by what the Demos report calls the federal purchasing footprint. According to the report, woman make up 71.2 percent and minorities 44.7 percent of low-wage workers in the federally dependent workforce.

With Democrats facing a tough mid-term election and Obama’s legacy in question, the administration has sponsored largely symbolic initiatives to demonstrate that the president is on the side of working families. This is politically useful in showing the costs of Republican blockage. How much better if would be if Obama made the symbolism real.

The deep structural changes in the economy that are harming today’s workers are mainly the result of a corporate economy that tries to pay labor as little as possible in the absence of countervailing institutions of worker power. The federal government should be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Robert Kuttner’s new book is Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior Fellow at Demos, and teaches at Brandeis University’s Heller School.

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With the purchase of Dropcam by Nest, owned by Google, the announcement of the HomeKit platform by Apple at WWDC, and the release of Samsung’s Smart Home at CES earlier this year, the tech giants signaled that they are committed to interacting with consumers outside of the traditional mobile and desktop devices.

While the companies’ approaches to “smart homes” are different, with each leveraging their existing assets (Google – Nest, Apple – app platform, Samsung – home appliances), concerns about privacy remain.

Technology companies will know when we open the refrigerator, forget to turn off the oven, and leave the lights on in the bedroom. The increase in the granularity of the collected data of people’s movements broaches a new set of issues with regards to what consumers are willing to share versus the compelling benefits of having such technology integrated in a home. Although the use cases of this data are seemingly limitless, the ways in which tech companies will actually utilize the data remains unclear.

In a blog post last week, Nest stated that:

Like Nest customer data, Dropcam will come under Nest’s privacy policy, which explains that data won’t be shared with anyone (including Google) without a customer’s permission. Nest has a paid-for business model and ads are not part of our strategy. In acquiring Dropcam, we’ll apply that same policy to Dropcam too.

While ad supported platforms often offer free products in exchange for information from consumers, ranging from phrases entered into a search engine to updates of our social media profiles, smart homes involve hard goods that are purchased. Should we be relieved by that? Is the Metafilter quote “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold” still relevant?

Of course, privacy is incredibly important to consumers, and the breach of privacy, whether through hacking or being inundated with advertisements, is a serious matter. What we tend to forget is that ultimately, the responsibility of privacy management does not rest solely on the shoulders of technology companies; it rests on consumers too. More often than not, we eagerly participate, if not outright embrace, the various apps and devices that provide incredible benefits in terms of safety, convenience, and general improvement in our daily lives. These benefits do (and should) have a cost associated with them. Whether that cost is simply the monetary transaction linked to the purchase of smart home products or evolves to something far more like Big Brother is yet to be seen. However, for the symbiotic relationship between companies and consumers to thrive, trust is paramount.

The myriad of issues associated with this will require a dialogue between tech firms and consumers to determine proper costs and benefits. That said, in light of a generation who so easily tags photos on Instagram, shares articles on Twitter, swipes right on Tinder, posts updates on Facebook, rents apartments on Airbnb, perhaps we have already grown comfortable with strangers, and perhaps we gave up our privacy a long time ago.

The smell of blood is once again in the air in Washington — this week for airstrikes and other forms of violent intervention in Iraq. (Reference: Many of the same people — McCain and Graham in particular — were only recently calling for airstrikes or other military action in the Ukraine, and before that Syria, and before that…)

Here are some of the many reasons airstrikes (or any other form of U.S. military action) in Iraq are just a terrible idea.

1) Air strikes will not resolve anything significant.

The short answer is through nine years of war and occupation U.S. air power in Iraq, employed on an unfettered scale, combined with the full weight of the U.S. military on the ground plus billions of dollars in reconstruction funds, failed to resolve the issues now playing out in Iraq. Why would anyone think a lesser series of strikes would work any better?

We also have a recent Iraqi example of the pointlessness of air strikes. The Maliki government employed them with great vigor against Sunnis in western Iraq, including in Fallujah, only six months ago, and here we are again, with an even more powerful Sunni force in the field.

2) But air strikes now are crucial to buying the Iraqi government time to seek a political solution.

See above about nine years of ineffectiveness. Today’s crisis is not new; Iraqi PM Maliki has been in power since 2006 and has done nothing to create an inclusive government. Indeed, he has done much to actively ostracize, alienate, jail and destroy his Sunni opposition. Maliki currently is his non-inclusionary own Minister of the Interior and Minister of Defense. Replacing Maliki, another regime change the U.S. now apparently supports, is no magic cure. Maliki’s successor will most likely come from his own majority party, and inherit his own ties to Iran and the many Shia groups needed to stay in power. Even with good intentions, a new Prime Minister will walk into office in the midst of a raging, open war against Sunni forces — not exactly the best place to start towards a more inclusive government. This argument of buying the Iraqis time is the same falsehood that fueled the unsuccessful Surges in Iraq (2007) and Afghanistan (2009). History matters, and it is time to accept that despite arguable tactical progress, in the longer view, the Surges did not work. And long views are what matter.

Even David Petraeus, once America’s golden boy as architect of the Iraq Surge, warns against military intervention now in Iraq.

3) John Kerry flying around the world diplomizing on Iraq is an airstrike of its own.

Worth noting is also the uselessness of American diplomacy. Since 2006 the U.S. has maintained its largest embassy in the world in Baghdad, with thousands of State Department and military personnel, alongside no doubt a healthy intelligence presence. It is clear that all those diplomats have not accomplished much in service to Iraqi reconciliation under even the more peaceful conditions in the past. It is unrealistic to expect more now.

As for recruiting allies to intercede somehow with America in Iraq, that seems equally unlikely. The British, America’s former stalwart companion in global adventures, refused to get involved in American action last September in Syria. British involvement in the 2003 invasion remains controversial at home, and it is hard to see the Brits getting fooled again.

4) Airstrikes are surgical.

Oh, please. Check with the wedding parties in Yemen destroyed, and funeral gatherings massacred in Pakistan. Bombs and missiles are not surgical tools. They blow stuff up. It is impossible to avoid killing people near the other people you set out to kill, what the U.S. blithely refers to as collateral damage. And even that assumes you are aiming the weapons even close to the right place to begin with. Bad info that identifies the wrong house means you kill an innocent family, not a ISIS command cell.

And even if you take the coldest American view possible that collateral damage is just an unavoidable cost of war, you fail to understand the real cost. Every innocent killed sets the population further against the U.S. and the people the U.S. seeks to support, both in Iraq and throughout the greater Middle East. Videos of dead children propagate well over social media.

5) Airstrikes are not a counterinsurgency tool.

See nine years of war and occupation in Iraq, or forever years of war in places like Vietnam. You cannot bomb away a political movement. You cannot kill an idea that motivates millions of people with a Hellfire missile.

6) Airstrikes mean the U.S. is taking sides in a pitbull fight.

The U.S. strikes would presumably be in an attempt to support the “Iraqi government and army.” The problem is that those entities are elusive. The Maliki government enjoys uneven public support, so supporting it alienates swaths of the Iraqi population and nearly requires them to take up arms against the U.S. and its puppets. The forces Maliki is putting into the field include a growing number of Shia militias under the control, such as that even is, of individual warlords and religious leaders. These are fighters who actively killed Americans just a few years ago, but somehow we’re on their side now. Maliki’s collection of forces are also bolstered in various ways by Iran. Somehow we’re on their side now too. Airstrikes are part of a pattern of failed short-term thinking by the U.S.

7) Airstrikes are just more of “whack-a-mole” foreign policy.

These entanglements are much more serious than to be dismissed as “well, politics makes for strange bedfellows” or “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Such trite phrases are typical of a U.S. foreign policy that only sees discrete crises within clear geopolitical borders. As long as the U.S. fantasizes that it can support Sunni fighters in Syria while striking them in Iraq, and as long as the U.S. believes it can bolster Iranian goals and credibility in Iraq while pushing back against it elsewhere in the Gulf, the worse things will get in the broader region.

The same applies to the U.S.’ global “whack-a-mole” geopolitical strategy. Russia invades the Ukraine? A devoted by Washington to that. Boko Harem kidnaps girls? Ten days of Twitter memes. Iraq simmers for years? Let’s act now (and only now) before the next shiny object distracts our leaders.

8 ) But airstrikes are necessary because the U.S. must “do something.”

Nope. There is nothing that says the U.S. must “do something” in response to all world events. There are many reasons to say even if we are compelled to do something, a military “solution” is not necessarily, or even often, the right thing to do. Imagine if you are outside a burning house, with a can of gasoline in your hand. With the compulsion to do something, is it better to throw the gas can into the flames, or stand back. Sometimes the best answer is indeed to stand back.

9) ISIS is a threat to the U.S. and has to be air struck to stop another 9/11.

ISIS is far from the supervillains the U.S. media has seen necessary to depict them as. The groups fighting on the “Sunni” side, such as it is, are a collection of tribal, Baathist, religious, warlord and other conglomerations. Their loosely-organized goal is to hold territory that criss-crosses the borders of Iraq and Syria. Absent some odd event, they are likely to withdraw or be chased out of central Iraq and hold on out west, where they have existed as a state-like thing for some time now. Central Iraq is way too far from their home base to retain supply lines (though they have been doing well capturing weapons from the retreating Iraqi forces), and Shia militia strength is more powerful the closer ISIS, et al, get to Baghdad.

The threat line is most ardently espoused by who else, Dick Cheney, who brought out his own go-to scary thing, saying “One of the things I worried about 12 years ago — and that I worry about today — is that there will be another 9/11 attack and that the next time it’ll be with weapons far deadlier than airline tickets and box cutters.”

ISIS and/or its Sunni supporters in Iraq have held territory in western Iraq for years without being a threat to the U.S. Homeland. Little changes if they hold a bit more, or less territory.

ISIS is not a transnational terror group, and unless the U.S. drives them into an alliance with al Qaeda (as the U.S. did in the early years of the 2003 invasion with the Sunnis), they are unlikely to be. They fight with small arms in small groups under loose leadership. They will not be invading the U.S.

10) Bottom line why airstrikes are a terrible waste:

The U.S. lost the war in Iraq years ago, probably as early as 2003. It is time to accept that. Airstrikes will not change the ground truth.