The biggest show in video games starts off the same every year: with a seemingly endless torrent of announcements, teasers and surprises a full day before the show floor even opens. It’s nerve wracking, but wonderful; Never change, E3. On Day zer…
Sometimes, it’s the accidental discoveries that make the biggest impact. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have learned that carbon-rich nanorods created in a botched experiment might be ideal for harvesting water. When there’s r…
Sometimes the status updates we see on Facebook aren’t always about announcing and celebrating milestones in life, like getting married, having a baby, moving to a new country, launching your own business, and so on. Sometimes those updates are actually a cry for help from someone suicidal that we might miss.
This is something Facebook hopes to change as they have recently begun rolling out suicide-prevention tools for users. These tools will be available via a drop-down menu in which users can report posts that will then be flagged by Facebook’s global community operations, who will then monitor the post to ensure that the person isn’t suicidal.
Users who flag the posts can also send a Facebook message directly, or coordinate with a mutual friend to figure out a way to reach out and help the person in need. Facebook will even provide suggestions on the kind of messages that they think would be effective/useful in situations like this, which according to Vanessa Callison-Burch, a Facebook product manager working on the project, “People really want to help, but often they just don’t know what to say, what to do or how to help their friends.”
Over the years, it seems that many NGOs and researchers have pushed Facebook to be more involved and to step up their game in helping prevent suicide, and it looks like this tool is a step in the right direction.
Facebook Is Rolling Out Suicide-Prevention Tools , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Google has gradually been expanding its Fiber gigabit internet service across the United States and now it’s looking at yet another potential city where it could expand the service. The company has announced today that it’s looking at Dallas, Texas, as the next potential Google Fiber city. It’s only exploring the idea right now so it can’t be said for sure if Google Fiber will really become available in Dallas.
Google is quick to point this out itself. Just because it’s exploring the idea of bringing Fiber to Dallas doesn’t mean it will necessarily be expanded to that city.
The company usually announces its intention of expanding to a new city first and then works with local authorities to try and figure out if it really will be possible to roll out the gigabit service in that city.
“Working alongside Mayor Mike Rawlings and local leaders, we’ll use our Fiber checklist to learn more about local topography, existing infrastructure, and other factors that may impact construction,” Google said in today’s announcement.
Google Fiber is currently available in six metropolitan areas and is currently the process of being rolled out to six more. It won’t be the only gigabit internet service in Dallas though, AT&T provides its own gigabit service to some parts of the city already.
Google Fiber Could Come To Dallas , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
As Nintendo had previously stated, their presence at E3 will be about showing off new games and not the Nintendo NX, and that the upcoming The Legend of Zelda would be one of them. Sure enough that’s exactly what Nintendo did because The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been officially revealed.
Now from the screenshots of the game and its trailer, this is obviously no longer the Zelda game that many of us have grown up with. Sure, Majora’s Mask might have added a “dark” element to the game, there was still a slight cutesy feel to it, and that style kind of persisted until Twilight Princess where things started to change, and Breath of the Wild is simply the next step in the evolution.
The graphics look pretty amazing and while nowhere near photorealistic, they do look pretty good and stylized. Breath of the Wild will also feature more voice-acting than Nintendo has ever done for a Zelda game than before, and there also appears to be features like the ability to change multiple outfits, wear a set of armor, cooking, and gliding, and more.
Also gone are the heart pickups from the game. Instead if gamers want to replenish life, they will have to forage for food. It also sports an open-world concept where Link is free to go anywhere he wants. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is expected to be released next year where it will be available on the Nintendo NX and the Wii U. In the meantime you can check it out the game’s trailer in the video above.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Is Official , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
iOS 10 was announced yesterday and while Apple did go over some of the major changes and new features that they would be introducing to the game, they also glossed over some other details that we reckon might be just as interesting to users. One of those features is the ability to shoot in RAW.
For those unfamiliar with RAW photos, essentially these are photos that have not been compressed or pre-processed by your camera. This format is usually favored by professional photographers as it allows them a great degree of control over how an image is edited later on. The only downside is that RAW files tend to be many times larger than regular JPEGs.
That being said, Apple did confirm RAW support during one of their workshops in which they noted that it will only work with the rear camera, it can shoot in both RAW and JPEG at the same time (thus generating two files), and that it will be stored in Adobe’s DNG format, so editing it with the likes of Lightroom should not be an issue.
Developers will also have to manually implement the feature in their own apps, meaning that they shouldn’t expect RAW format to be automatically enabled on devices that run iOS 10. The bad news is that it looks like only Apple’s newer iPhones and iPads will support the format. This includes the iPhone 6s, 6s Plus, SE, and the 9.7-inch iPad (oddly enough no mention of the iPad Pro). It is also unclear if Apple will bring the feature to its default iOS camera.
iOS 10 Will Let iPhones And iPads Shoot In RAW , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Some of us work really hard to craft tweets that get dozens of retweets soon after we send them out, but for a vast majority of twitter users, regularly getting retweets can be a rare occurrence. If you are one of those users, Twitter is here to help you out. The microblogging network has announced that it has now made it much easier for users to retweet or quote themselves.
Quoting yourself on Twitter hasn’t always been that straightforward. You were required to copy the link to your previous tweet and paste it in the new tweet just to show people that you had rightly called something or made a correct prediction.
It’s much easier when you have to quote somebody else. Just click on the button and write your own comments on it and send it out. Now it’s going to get easier to do that to your own tweets.
Retweeting your own tweets is exactly like retweeting someone else. Just tap on the icon and you’re good to go. Quoting yourself works the same way as well, so you can now start going through all of your previous hilarious tweets and share them with your followers once again because everybody likes to see rehashed content on the internet, right?
Now you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself with just a few taps. Pick an old favorite and give it a try! 🔄 https://t.co/bUj4ezQNOJ
— Twitter (@twitter) June 14, 2016
Twitter Now Lets You Retweet Yourself , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
No more. Orlando should put an end to inaction. When American citizens are murdered by assault-rifle toting terrorists and told by their government that gun regulation nevertheless remains politically impossible, but maybe we will give it another whirl a bit later, it’s time for a real revolution. It’s time for cities and their mayors to say NO. No guns in our towns. No guns in our sports arenas. No guns in our clubs. No guns period. Like Dodge City under those intimidating sheriffs in the bad old days, tell folks to park their weapons at the city limits. Or stay out of town.
Yes, some cities have tried that. Washington D.C., for example. And the courts came down on them like a ton of AR 14s: “You can’t do that! It Infringes the Second Amendment. You lack the standing to ban anything.”
Enough. No more casualties as witnesses to the stupidity of craven federal and state officials. I wrote a book with the rhetorical tittle “If Mayors Ruled the World.” Time for mayors to make it real. Let mayors in Washington, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle and Orlando – let hundreds more in the heartland in between — let them say to the courts: “Sue us. Fine us. Put us in jail. We will not permit guns in our cities. You have defaulted on your sovereignty, defaulted on the protection of our lives that our obedience was supposed to secure. You have broken the social contract, and now it is up to us to protect our citizens. With or without you.”
Say it loud and clear: “Time to rehearse the logic of our earlier revolution: no assassination without representation! You can’t go on letting us be murdered in the name of protecting our Second Amendment rights!” This isn’t posturing. Democracy is on our side: 70% of Americans want gun control, 75% of the population live in cities.
Democratic theory is on our side too. The social contract strikes a simple bargain among citizens and the sovereign state: we constitute and agree to obey you, you: secure our lives and liberties, take us out of the state of nature which as Thomas Hobbes said long ago is little more than a “war of all against all” where the life of man is “nasty, brutish and short.” We surrender our natural liberty, you secure our civic safety.
Yet today we face an urban war of some against the rest, and the federal state won’t disarm the ideological bandits and the terrorists for whom ‘nasty, brutish and short’ is a way of life — and death. If the state can’t protect us, it forfeits its right to obedience and at least in this domain forfeits its sovereign legitimacy. Call it a sovereign default.
Obeying federal laws (or their absence on guns) is getting 33,000 people killed every year and inviting terrorists to haul their heavy weapons into town after town – or to buy them locally with the government’s complicity – to massacre our children and families and neighbors.
We’ve been bandying about the term revolution recently to distinguish campaigns for the Presidency whose candidates will no more be able to act on guns if elected than President Obama was. How about this for a revolution? Refuse to obey laws preventing cities from disarming lunatics, criminals and terrorists bent on mayhem, refuse to let your neighbors be mowed down in the name of a principle that amounts to letting folks who want to keep an AK 47 around the house for target practice do as they please.
Let’s go, Mr. Mayor, to the barricades, Madame Mayor, cities too can do civil disobedience. Get together, make a new social contract, keep your citizens safe. Take on the Feds, take on the courts, take on those craven legislators bought or cowed by the NRA, and tell them there will be no more guns in our cities. Period.
No need to wait for a paralyzed and gridlocked Federal government where the few tell the many that their archaically interpreted Second amendment rights are more important than their lives. Confiscate the guns. Outlaw their sale. Bar them from coming in. Regulate carry and conceal. Ban the assault rifles.
That’s what every other civilized nation in the world does. No more Orlando’s. If the Feds can’t do it, cities can. If the Congress won’t, mayors must. If it takes a revolution, well then it takes a revolution. Let Orlando become our Lexington: shots heard around the world that finally put an end to our murderous gun culture which has become an ideal setting for the flourishing of domestic terrorism.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a “final rule” prohibiting discrimination in healthcare and health insurance, clarifying a policy already laid out in the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Gender, race, disability, age, and place of birth should not affect the cost and quality of care a person receives from any provider receiving federal funding, the final rule states.
This announcement did not inspire many headlines, perhaps because many Americans have already been reaping the benefits of the ACA’s antidiscrimination policy for several years.
For women, however, the changes could have a major impact.
Gender Rating
Before the ACA, women buying insurance on the individual market were routinely charged up to 50 percent more for monthly premiums than men. In some cases the gap was as high as 81 percent.
The practice, known as “gender rating,” is similar to car insurance companies charging a higher premium to insure teenage drivers.
When it comes to health insurance, women are considered a higher risk than men because they tend to visit the doctor more frequently, live longer, and have babies.
Whether or not women truly cost health insurance companies more money is up for debate.
Regardless, gender rating is now illegal. Under the ACA, insurance companies are prohibited from charging women more than men and are required to cover the total cost of certain key preventative services specific to women’s health, like well-woman visits and contraception.
Companies must offer maternity coverage, too, although a loophole in the law does leave some insured women without maternity coverage today.
Risks vs. Fairness
Some advocacy groups like the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have celebrated the policy change.
But it has also been met with criticism from those who believe insurance companies should be able to consider risk factors when taking on customers.
Hadley Heath Manning, director of health policy at the Independent Women’s Forum, a right-leaning think tank, argued in favor of gender rating in a 2013 opinion piece published in Time Magazine.
“If fairness were really the guiding principle, it would be quite simple: women would pay more for health insurance because women consume more health care,” she wrote.
Manning told Healthline that her opinion hasn’t changed in the years since that piece was published.
“I still believe that gender based pricing should be a tool that is available to insurers,” she said.
Taking away the ability of health insurers to assess risk and charge on the basis of that risk, Manning says, means that some people pay premiums that are too high while others pay premiums that are too low.
On a broader level, though, the issue “gets to the heart of what health insurance is,” Manning said.
Health insurance is unique in that it covers routine services and not just unexpected costs. Car owners don’t bill their insurance companies for oil changes and tire rotations. Instead, insurance only gets involved when there has been an unseen incident, like a collision, that would have been difficult to save for ahead of time.
Similarly, Manning and others have argued, routine doctors’ visits could be taken out of the realm of the third-party payer and paid for directly by the patient. That way, providers can compete with each other to offer the patient the best prices.
It’s Not Car Insurance
Some reject the car insurance analogy, however, because caring for cars is fundamentally different from caring for human bodies.
“Unlike 1984 Ford Tempos, we don’t send people to the scrap heap if they’re old, infirm, or otherwise financially inconvenient,” Scott Galupo, a political commenter, wrote in a blog post for the American Conservative.
James Kwak, Ph.D., a law professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote in a 2009 blog post for The Washington Post that the consequences of a free market healthcare system would be “bleak.”
“Actuarially fair health insurance is something that only works for healthy people,” he wrote.
To make a profit, the reasonable thing for an insurance company to do is to charge higher rates for sicker people, or avoid insuring sick people altogether.
“When we say that anyone should be able to get health insurance, we are saying that someone should be forced to lose money insuring sick people,” he wrote.
Still No Guarantees
Even with the government mandates, women’s access to healthcare is far from guaranteed.
Women are less likely to be insured than men because their incomes tend to be less, Dania Palanker, J.D., a senior counsel at NWLC, told Healthline.
A 2013 Kaiser Family Foundation study found that women still face greater financial hardship than men when it comes to paying for healthcare. One in four women reported putting off care for financial reasons, compared with one in five men.
“A lot of what we’re working on now is making sure that insurance companies are providing the services that are required to be covered according to the ACA,” Palanker said.
Part of the problem is that the new law is not always clear in what is expected of insurance companies. The NWLC advocates for clear, strong guidance in order to cut down on ambiguity and confusion, Palanker said.
The “final rule” issued last month is an example of such clarification.
“There are also insurers working very closely with the administration to offer really good coverage through marketplaces and find ways to improve coverage, improve products, and reduce costs at the same time,” Palanker said.
By Rose Rimler
The original article can be found on Healthline.com.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Graduation season is time to celebrate huge milestones and your gift choice is very important. There was a time when graduation gifts consisted of money and flowers…that was then, this is now. Here are the practical, the indulgent, the necessities and the showstoppers. It’s a graduation nation so check out my awesome gift ideas.
If You Go for the $Green$, put it in a Cool Card
Papyrus
22 Manhattan Locations and counting! The most beautiful, chic greeting cards, gift wrap, invitations, custom printing and delightful gifts!
Maison 24
470 Park Ave
New York, NY 10022
(212) 355-2414
Whenever I need a unique and adorable greeting card I pop in on Park and I’m sure to find something whimsical. This “luxury lifestyle brand of modern and traditional design-inspired home furniture, men’s and women’s accessories, and decorative object” emporium does gift giving right; gift wrap, vast array of special gifts for everyone and on point advice!
Monogrammed Anything is Always High On My List
Goyard
Maison Goyard
20 East 63rd Street
New York, NY 10065
(212) 813-0005
This gift hits all the marks; monogrammed, a statement bag or luggage.
Louis Vuitton
1 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022
(212)758-8877
Handbags, Travel & Luggage, Small Accessories; from a beautiful key case to a suite of luggage; your grad is sure to be happy. Personalize with vivid colors and initials and make it special.
Mrs. John L. Strong
699 Madison Avenue 5th Floor
New York, New York 10065
(212) 838-3775
Here you can find “personal and bespoke stationery that fits the personality of the sender. In a world of digital correspondence, Mrs. John L. Strong remains committed to preserving the craft of letter writing; hand engraving each motif and letter to ensure each piece is the finest quality.” Classic and elegant!
Feather Their Nest With Beautiful Bedding
Gift a luxe linen set to help them transition to their new life or get them dorm room ready.
Frette
799 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10065
(212)988-5221
Bed and bath linens; they certainly know how to dress a bed or outfit a bath with the finest fabrics!
Dwell Studio
77 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
(646)442-6000
“Our bedding collection has everything you need to make the perfect bed. From quality down and down alternative duvet and pillow inserts to must-have duvet covers and luxurious quilts there is something for everyone and every bedroom. Our duvet sets and covers feature original designs ranging from hand drawn floral to graphic patterns. Finish the bed with a classic or printed sheet set, tailored shams or euro shams and an eye-catching decorative pillow. Making the bed has never been so chic.” Dwell said it best!
Pottery Barn Teen
1451 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10021
(212) 879-2513
With an entire section dedicated to dorm decor, this is a great spot to find exactly what your grad needs. Patterns that pop and accessories to match!
For the Beauty Addicts
Manhattan Locations Galore!
Obviously the temple of beauty so any gift from here will get you rave reviews. I suggest a gift card…
14 Manhattan Locations
Get your grad a gift certificate or membership for blowouts! Perfect hair is always appreciated.
Gifts to Travel the World in Style
Available online or @
Hides in Shape
555 Madison Ave
New York, NY 10022
(212)371-5998
Air Luggage
55 E 59th St.
New York, NY 10022
(212)308-0930
BLOOMINGDALE’S
1000 Third Ave.
New York,NY 10022
(212)705-2000
Classic yet on trend. A luggage set is perfect for future adventures!
Rimowa
535 Madison Ave
New York, NY 10022
(212) 758-1060
Modern, light and travel ready! Chicest of colors.
Airbnb
Give them the gift of adventure! Not your average gift card.
Happy Summer & Happy Shopping!
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