Hasta La Gadget!

When it comes to displays, Samsung is no stranger to pushing the limits and at CES every year, the company has never failed to impress us with their latest and greatest display technology. This is also why it does not come as a surprise to learn that Samsung has debuted yet another amazing piece of display technology in the form of a 34-foot 4K HDR LED Cinema Screen.

According to Samsung, “The 34 foot Samsung Cinema Screen easily accommodates modern theater dimensions. In addition to delivering LED picture quality at 4K (4,096 x 2,160) resolution, the screen also exceeds the highly-esteemed DCI specifications used to ensure a uniform and high level of technical performance, reliability, and quality in digital cinema.”

The company is also boasting that this is the world’s first display that has HDR LED technology. Clearly this isn’t aimed for the average consumer for home theater setups, and we reckon at 34-feet even home cinema enthusiasts will have a hard time finding a place for it in their homes, so presumably it will be aimed at more commercial usage, but it’s still an impressive piece of technology all the same.

Samsung has yet to officially announce how much this Cinema Screen will cost, but given that the 88-inch Samsung Q9 announced at CES 2017 is said to cost around $30,000, we’d hate to think how much this new display will be priced at.

Samsung Debuts 34-Foot 4K HDR LED Cinema Screen , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Just the other day Apple released iOS 10.3 and if you needed a reason to update, apart from the patching of a Safari security hole, it seems that there is a good chance that if you were to update your iPhone to iOS 10.3, you might notice some speed increases, or at least that’s what’s being claimed at the moment.

In a tweet by Renaud Lienhart, it seems that the reason behind the perceived speediness is due to the fact that iOS 10.3 has tweaked the animations and shortened, meaning that the launching and closing of apps should feel ever so faster. Now whether or not you will notice these differences remains to be seen, and according to The Verge who did their own testing, they did not notice any significant differences between a device running iOS 10.2.1 and one that ran iOS 10.3.

iOS 10.3 feels “snappier” because many animations were slightly tweaked & shortened, for the better.

— Renaud Lienhart (@NotoriousBUGS) March 28, 2017

However they did concede that iOS did feel more responsive during daily tasks, but like we said your mileage may vary depending on how sensitive you are to these kinds of changes. In addition to these changes, Apple has also made a rather significant change by moving from the HFS+ file system to APFS, which seems to have freed up quite a bit of storage for users, so if you haven’t updated already, maybe you should consider doing so.

Take note that due to the move from HFS+ to APFS, the update should take longer than normal updates, so you’ll want to ensure your phone has enough juice, and that maybe you’re not expecting any important calls or messages for at least the next 20-30 minutes.

iOS 10.3 Should Make Your iPhone Feel Faster , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Samsung has finally, fully, and officially unveiled the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+, and with them comes the first iteration of Bixby, Samsung’s homegrown voice-controlled personal assistant. Naturally, Bixby is promised to be able to do more than your average voice-controlled personal assistant, but while we still have to wait for confirmation of its greatness, it will at least be … Continue reading

The Trump administration is not planning on claiming land on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border for purposes of building a border wall, an administration official confirmed to The Huffington Post.

The possibility of such a seizure was raised in vague remarks by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke this week, when he spoke about the difficulty of building a partition between the two countries along the Rio Grande.

“The border is complicated, as far as building a physical wall,” Zinke reportedly said. “The Rio Grande, what side of the river are you going to put the wall? We’re not going to put it on our side and cede the river to Mexico. And we’re probably not going to put it in the middle of the river.”

Democrats argued that Zinke’s remark implied that the administration was actively contemplating building a wall in Mexico, which would be both legally dubious and diplomatically problematic. But Zinke’s spokeswoman Heather Swift said this was a misreading. 

“Secretary Zinke was talking about a combo of natural boundaries, fence, wall, towers, surveillance, etc. and regarding the river he was noting challenges that are being looked at,” she emailed. “He wasn’t proposing any policy.”

And so, the U.S. government won’t be making eminent domain claims in Mexico. But the clarification of Zinke’s statement is still newsworthy in its own right.

Trump, after all, spent the campaign insisting that he would build a big, beautiful wall along the Mexican border that would have a large door to let in legal immigrants and would be entirely paid for by the Mexican government.

Mexico has refused to pay for it. And now, it appears, the administration is conceding that it won’t be an actual, physical wall along huge swaths of the southern border, at least for the Rio Grande portions.

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WASHINGTON ― At a roundtable discussion on the opioid epidemic Wednesday, President Donald Trump lamented that a crisis which has claimed tens of thousands of lives in recent years has not gotten enough attention. And in an effort to turn the tide, he announced he was forming a commission led by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

“It’s really one of our biggest problems our country has, and nobody really wants to talk about it,” Trump said, flanked by top administration officials and individuals with firsthand experience battling addiction to opioids. “More importantly, we have to solve the problem.”

Trump has pledged to play an active role in combating opioid abuse, and his appointment of Christie, who elevated the issue as a candidate in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, shows he still is paying attention to the topic.

But for those on the front lines of the epidemic, much of what the president has done so far has been, at least, a disappointment and, at worst, likely to do more harm than good.

Trump, for starters, seems willing to unwind approaches that were working to alleviate the crisis in favor of going back to the combative “drug war” policies of the 1980s, which have long since been discredited. Attorney General Jeff Sessions reflected this antiquated mindset when he recently called for a return to former first lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” strategy to address drug use.

 “There’s a lot of frustration from the advocacy community,” said Daniel Raymond, the deputy director of planning and policy at Harm Reduction Coalition, which seeks to end the stigma of addiction and champions public health reforms. “Are we really going to spend six months reinventing the wheel here at a time when overdose deaths have never been higher? Nobody feels like we can take a wait-and-see approach.”

But it’s not just the framework that has advocates worried. It’s the financial commitments, too. The administration’s proposed budget calls for steep cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health as well as a reorganization of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ― agencies vital to funding treatment initiatives and research to improve treatment for future generations.

Last week, in an embarrassing defeat, Trump tried to help pass a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, an effort that would have stalled the Medicaid expansion in multiple states. It also would have had severe consequences for those in recovery, advocates warned. But the harm wouldn’t stop there. The GOP replacement bill would have allowed insurance companies to stop offering mental health coverage or drug addiction treatment. If it had passed, 24 million Americans would have lost their health insurance, according to Congressional Budget Office projections.

Are we really going to spend six months reinventing the wheel here at a time when overdose deaths have never been higher?
Daniel Raymond, Harm Reduction Coalition

Setting up a symbolic commission while working to defund actual initiatives, therapies and research has reinforced public health officials’ fears that Trump hasn’t studied up on the epidemic enough and might stall the progress the Obama administration made in addressing the issue.

“This is a national crisis that demands a sustained strategy and funding and a real commitment,” said Joshua Sharfstein, an associate dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “That has not been evident to date.”

The opioid epidemic was fairly central to Trump’s political appeal during the campaign. In the early days of the presidential race, he brought up the issue on the stump as a way to justify his promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. And he had an audience for his message. The crisis has devastated states across the country, most notably in Rust Belt communities in West Virginia and Ohio and in early primary states, including New Hampshire.

With the spread of deadly synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, communities have struggled to maintain the spread of overdose deaths. A recent CDC study showed that opioids killed more than 33,000 people in 2015, a record. Drug overdoses now kill more than the HIV/AIDS epidemic did at its height in the U.S.

The Obama administration gradually ― some argue too gradually ― coalesced around a policy that shunned the drug warrior tactics for a public health approach that helped to mainstream programs such as needle exchanges. The then head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Michael Botticelli, derided the war on drugs as a failure.

Botticelli and others in the administration, most notably officials in the Department of Health and Human Services, reduced barriers to medication-assisted treatment, which the medical establishment views as the best chance for someone with an opioid addiction to make a lasting recovery. The treatment combines medications such as Suboxone or methadone with counseling. It has been shown to dramatically lower the rate of overdose deaths.

By the end of his term, President Barack Obama, along with bipartisan allies in Congress, successfully included $1 billion in funding in the 21st Century Cures Act to enhance evidence-based treatment. The surgeon general also published a definitive report on the epidemic and how to address it.

But since taking office, Trump has rebelled against Obama’s policies. “I think there is a tremendous amount of fear that we are going to retreat from all of the science and evidence that we know to be true about addiction,” Botticelli told The Huffington Post in late January, before the end of his tenure as the nation’s drug czar.

In the runup to their budget unveiling, Trump and his team have floated the idea of dismantling the drug czar’s office. And advocates are worried that the commission headed by Christie ― which includes the heads of HHS and Veterans Affairs, along with Sessions ― would replace it.

“Commissions are nice to have and they are great for generating news, but at the end of the day we have to remember the federal government already has tools in place to address this issue in a smart way,” says Rafael Lemaitre, who worked in the drug czar’s office for more than a decade. “It just needs to use them. There are literally dozens of nonpartisan experts working in the White House today that should be leaned on and supported. There’s already a commission to address the opioid crisis. It’s called the ONDCP.”

To Lemaitre’s point, there were relatively few actual experts at Trump’s event on Wednesday. Along with Cabinet secretaries, there was Pam Bondi, the attorney general of Florida, and retired New York Yankees reliever Mariano Rivera. One of, if not the only, treatment specialists who appeared was AJ Solomon, a 26-year-old who used to work for Christie’s advance team. He was in recovery and started his own treatment facility in New Jersey, which offers intensive therapeutic services. He was just happy to be able to meet the president.

“It was just awesome ― beyond my wildest dreams ― as someone in recovery meeting the president,” he told HuffPost. 

— 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.