Dress Your iPad 2 in Dinosaur Bones and Diamonds for $8 Million (Mashable)

We've seen many expensive gadget makeovers, but this one probably takes the cake for being over the top: An iPad 2 dressed in gold, diamonds and bones of a 65-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex. Stuart Hughes's iPad 2 Gold History Edition, as this ultra-high-end gadget is called, is a regular iPad 2 on the inside.

[More from Mashable: iPhone 4S Makes Its Debut in Hong Kong & 14 Countries November 11]

On the outside, however, it's encrusted with 53 flawless diamonds, 24-carat gold, and the thigh bone of the aforementioned predator, splintered and shaved into an ammolite rock that covers the front frame of the device.

Only two units will be made, so if you've got ?5 million ($8 million) to spend, hurry up. Just remember you can buy 16,000 regular iPad 2s for the price.

[More from Mashable: Behind the Tweets: New Twitter Site Reveals Users? Stories]

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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RIM Offers Buy Two, Get One Free for BlackBerry PlayBooks (NewsFactor)

Research In Motion hopes to move some PlayBooks before the end of the year with a promotion that aims at business users. The BlackBerry U.S. Web site is making an offer it hopes mobile business users won't be able to refuse.

From now until Dec. 31, BlackBerry business customers can get one free PlayBook tablet with every two purchased from an authorized retailer. To make the pot even sweeter, business customers can also choose a premium accessory for each tablet, either a leather sleeve, a charging pod or a six-foot cable.

Optimizing for Enterprises

The promotion comes just days after RIM announced a delay in PlayBook OS 2.0. David Smith, senior vice president of BlackBerry PlayBook for RIM, specifically mentioned enterprise plans in his Oct. 25 blog post. In a move that plays on RIM's historic strengths,, he said, RIM is addressing barriers to tablet adoption, including device manageability and enterprise application deployment.

"Enterprises will uniquely have the ability to manage tablets from a centralized server, while BlackBerry Balance ensures a seamless user experience for personal and professional needs and gives CIOs the peace of mind that corporate data is secure," Smith wrote.

Smith said BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 will also offer dedicated shelf space inside the BlackBerry App World storefront to make approved enterprise applications available to an organization's end users more quickly. RIM hopes these features will help change the way enterprises view and use tablets.

The PlayBook OS 2.0 update will also include advanced integrated e-mail, calendar and contact apps, a new video story, as well as new functionality that will allow your BlackBerry smartphone and BlackBerry PlayBook to work together even better.

Overcoming Downsides

"RIM is trying to boost sales with this promotion and this is one way to do it. The PlayBook is obviously not selling and it can't compete with the iPad, and it has shortcomings that we've discussed before," said Michael Disabato, managing vice president of Network and Telecom at Gartner.

The PlayBook offers true multitasking capabilities. But a major downside so far is that it has to be paired with a BlackBerry smartphone via a special application to access e-mail, calendar, address book, memo pad, task list, BlackBerry Messenger, and browsing functions. With the OS update put off, it remains to be seen if business users will take the PlayBook plunge before they see the software improvements.

Another downside is the lack of a strong system of developers and applications. As Disabato sees it, if RIM is going to compete with Apple and Android, it needs to attract more developers and roll out a user experience that doesn't require two pieces of equipment. At the end of the day, Apple still has the advantage.

"With this promotion, RIM will get traction with people who are thinking about buying a PlayBook or planning to buy one," Disabato said. "The government might decide employees don't need an iPad, they just need a tablet, and decide to buy the PlayBook. But this promotion is not going to displace any iPad sales before Christmas."

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/personaltech/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20111031/bs_nf/80804

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Insight: Firms to charge smokers, obese more for healthcare (Reuters)

(Reuters) ? Like a lot of companies, Veridian Credit Union wants its employees to be healthier. In January, the Waterloo, Iowa-company rolled out a wellness program and voluntary screenings.

It also gave workers a mandate - quit smoking, curb obesity, or you'll be paying higher healthcare costs in 2013. It doesn't yet know by how much, but one thing's for certain - the unhealthy will pay more.

The credit union, which has more than 500 employees, is not alone.

In recent years, a growing number of companies have been encouraging workers to voluntarily improve their health to control escalating insurance costs. And while workers mostly like to see an employer offer smoking cessation classes and weight loss programs, too few are signing up or showing signs of improvement.

So now more employers are trying a different strategy - they're replacing the carrot with a stick and raising costs for workers who can't seem to lower their cholesterol or tackle obesity. They're also coming down hard on smokers. For example, discount store giant Wal-Mart says that starting in 2012 it will charge tobacco users higher premiums but also offer free smoking cessation programs.

Tobacco users consume about 25 percent more healthcare services than non-tobacco users, says Greg Rossiter, a spokesman for Wal-Mart, which insures more than 1 million people, including family members. "The decisions aren't easy, but we need to balance costs and provide quality coverage."

For decades, workers - especially with large employers - have taken many health benefits for granted and until the past few years hardly noticed the price increases.

But the new policies could not only badly dent their take home pay and benefits but also reduce their freedom to behave as they want outside of work and make them resentful toward their employers. There are also fears the trend will hurt the lower-paid hardest as health costs can eat up a bigger slice of their disposable income and because they may not have much access to gyms and fresh food in their neighborhoods.

"It's not inherently wrong to hold people responsible," says Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a research and advocacy organization on employment issues based in Princeton, New Jersey. "But it's a dangerous precedent," he says. "Everything you do in your personal private life affects your health."

Overall, the use of penalties is expected to climb in 2012 to almost 40 percent of large and mid-sized companies, up from 19 percent this year and only 8 percent in 2009, according to an October survey by consulting firm Towers Watson and the National Business Group on Health. The penalties include higher premiums and deductibles for individuals who failed to participate in health management activities as well as those who engaged in risky health behaviors such as smoking.

"Nothing else has worked to control health trends," says LuAnn Heinen, vice president of the National Business Group on Health, which represents large employers on health and benefits issues. "A financial incentive reduces that procrastination."

LACK OF JOBS

The weak economy is contributing to the change. Employers face higher health care costs - in part - because they're hiring fewer younger healthy workers and losing fewer more sickly senior employees.

The poor job market also means employers don't have to be as generous with these benefits to compete. They now expect workers to contribute to the solution just as they would to a 401(k) retirement plan, says Jim Winkler, a managing principal at consulting firm Aon Hewitt's health and benefits practice. "You're going to face consequences based on whether you've achieved or not," he says.

And those that don't are more likely to be punished. An Aon Hewitt survey released in June found that almost half of employers expect by 2016 to have programs that penalize workers "for not achieving specific health outcomes" such as lowering their weight, up from 10 percent in 2011

The programs have until now met little resistance in the courts. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) prevents workers from being discriminated against on the basis of health if they're in a group health insurance plan. But HIPAA also allows employers to offer wellness programs and to offer incentives of up to 20 percent of the cost for participation.

President Barack Obama's big health care reform, the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, will enable employers beginning in 2014 to bump that difference in premiums to 30 percent and potentially up to 50 percent.

Employers do, however, also need to provide an alternative for workers who can't meet the goals. That could include producing a doctor's note to say it is medically very difficult, or even impossible, to achieve certain goals, says Timothy Jost, a professor at the Washington and Lee School of Law. For example, a worker with asthma may not be able to participate in a company exercise program.

These wellness programs typically include a health risk assessment completed online, and on-site free medical screenings for things such as blood pressure, body mass index, and cholesterol.

The programs, while voluntary, often typically offer financial benefits - including lower insurance premiums, gift cards and employer contributions to health savings accounts. For example, workers at the railroad company Union Pacific get $100 in their health savings account for completing the health assessment, $100 if they don't use tobacco and $100 if they get an annual physical (tobacco users also can get the $100 if they participate in a tobacco cessation program).

INCENTIVE TO EXERCISE

Like Wal-Mart, more employers are coming down harder on individuals who have voluntarily identified themselves as tobacco users, often during their health risk assessment. As yet, very few employers identify smokers through on-site medical screenings.

Veridian, which until now has not charged its employees for healthcare premiums, says increases to its health care costs have been unsustainable, climbing 9 percent annually for the past three years. Earlier this year, it rolled out a wellness program and free screenings, which 90 percent of workers have now completed.

As it starts charging, it will provide discounts to those making progress as it "wants to reward those who have healthy lifestyles," says Renee Christoffer, senior vice president of administration for the credit union.

Mark Koppedryer, vice president of branches at Veridian, was one of the workers who participated in the screenings. The 37-year-old father of three initially participated to show his support but was shocked to find out that he had elevated blood pressure and cholesterol scores.

His colleague, Stacy Phillips, says she used the new wellness programs to exercise more. "I knew there needed to be a change in my life," says the 35-year-old, who has lost 40 pounds since January. "This made me more aware that at some time there would be a cost."

These changes come at a time when health insurance premiums are soaring. In 2011, the average-cost of an employer-provided family plan was more than $15,000, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust. That's 31 percent higher than five years ago. And the number is expected to climb another 5-8 percent next year, according to various estimates.

In contrast, the giant medical and research center Cleveland Clinic, which employs about 40,000 people, has seen these costs grow by only 2 percent this year because it has implemented a comprehensive wellness program that has dramatically improved the health of many workers.

The effort began several years when it banned smoking at the medical center and then refused to hire smokers. It later recognized that having a gym and weight loss classes wasn't enough to get people to participate. It made these facilities and programs free and provided lower premiums to workers who maintained their health or improved it, typically with their doctor's help.

"You don't do this overnight," says Paul Terpeluk, Medical Director of Occupational Health at the Cleveland Clinic. You have to develop a program and change the culture, he said.

INTRUSIVE

But not all programs are as well constructed and effective, says Mark A. Rothstein, a lawyer and professor at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. The wellness programs may be well-intentioned, he says, but there's not strong empirical evidence that they work and getting a weekly call about your weight or smoking habits, which is offered by some programs, could be humiliating for participants.

"What might be seen as a question to one person may be an intrusion to another," he says. That's one reason that lower-paid janitors at his school participate but, "the professors on campus consider it a privacy tax so we don't get some stranger calling us about how much we weigh."

And there are also those that no matter how much they exercise or how healthy they eat can't lose weight or lower their blood pressure or body mass index. "There are thousands and thousands of people whose paycheck is being cut because of factors beyond their control," says Maltby from the National Workrights Institute.

The programs could be especially burdensome for low-income workers, who are more likely to fail health assessment tests and less likely to have access to gyms and healthier fresh produce, says Harald Schmidt - a research associate at the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

"We want to use provisions to help people and not penalize people for factors beyond their control," Schmidt says. "Poorer people are often less healthy and this constitutes a potential double whammy. They are likely to face a higher burden in insurance premiums."

That's the case for Barbara Collins, a 35-year-old Wal-Mart employee - who lives in Placerville , California. She says she'll have to pay $127 every two weeks for health insurance next year, including a penalty of almost $25 because she's a smoker.

"I'll cut back on cigarettes and hopefully eventually quit," says Collins, who earned $19,000 pretax, or about $730 every two weeks, last year. "Christmas will definitely be tight this year and for years to come if this lasts," she says. "Family vacations, there's no way I can afford that."

(Reporting by Jilian Mincer in New York. Editing by Martin Howell in New York)

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Army sergeant charged in Afghan murders faces accuser (Reuters)

TACOMA, Wash (Reuters) ? A U.S. Army sergeant charged with murdering three unarmed Afghan civilians as leader of a rogue platoon spoke often about how "easy" it was to disguise such slayings as combat casualties, his chief accuser testified on Monday.

Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock, sentenced in March to 24 years in prison for his role in the same killings, was the first prosecution witness called to the stand as testimony got underway in the court-martial of Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs.

Prosecutors have cast Gibbs as the main instigator, and Morlock as his right-hand man, in the most egregious case of atrocities U.S. military personnel are accused of committing in the 10 years of war in Afghanistan. The killings were initially exposed through a probe of rampant drug abuse among soldiers.

Published photographs showing Morlock and another soldier posing separately with the bloodied corpse of an Afghan boy they had just killed have drawn comparisons to the inflammatory Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq in 2004.

Gibbs, 26, of Billings, Montana, was the highest-ranking of five enlisted men from the infantry unit formerly known as the 5th Stryker Brigade charged with murdering Afghan villagers while deployed last year in Kandahar province.

He also was charged with cutting fingers off Afghan bodies and beating a fellow soldier who had alerted superiors to hashish use in their unit. Seven other Stryker soldiers were charged with lesser offenses. Most have already reached plea deals and have been sentenced.

If convicted on all charges, Gibbs faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He pleaded not guilty on the first day of his court-martial on Friday.

'WE CAN GET AWAY WITH IT'

Morlock, echoing his previous sworn statements in the case, testified on Monday that he and Gibbs had held dozens of discussions about how they could stage random killings of Afghan civilians to look like legitimate combat engagements.

Their schemes included the planting of captured enemy weapons, such as an assault rifle or hand grenade, near the body of a victim, Morlock said.

"We can get away with it. It's that easy," he quoted Gibbs as telling him.

Encountering one Afghan villager on patrol in February 2010, Morlock recounted that Gibbs "asked if we were willing to kill this guy or smoke him, and I said, 'Sure.'"

Gibbs turned and fired an AK-47 into a wall behind them to give the appearance they had been shot at, "then fired two to three rounds into the individual," Morlock testified. Morlock said he also shot the man, and that the AK-47 was left on the ground nearby.

A photograph displayed as evidence in court showed Gibbs, Morlock and a third soldier posed grinning over the man's body, lying in a pool of blood.

Asked by the prosecutor to explain the purpose of the photo, Morlock replied, "It was a victory photograph, a trophy photograph, if you will, sir."

Gibbs sat silently through Morlock's testimony, staring straight ahead at the desk in front of him. The two men, both in full dress uniform, avoided eye contact with each other.

In opening statements, defense lawyer Phillip Stackhouse suggested jurors would hear many interpretations of the events in question during the trial from various witnesses. But he did not directly address the question of his client's culpability for the three killings with which Gibbs is charged.

Stackhouse acknowledged that his client had removed fingers from Afghans killed in combat. But he said this was done once by accident in the process of quickly gathering biometric data from the corpse, as required by Army regulations. In other cases, he said, Gibbs was motivated by rage.

"Gibbs is mad; this individual had tried to kill him. These people had tried to kill him," Stackhouse said. "As the body is put in a body bag, he takes out a pair surgical shears and cuts off his index finger. Which one? The trigger finger."

Morlock agreed to testify against Gibbs and other co-defendants as part of a deal he reached with military prosecutors in March in which he pleaded guilty to three counts of premeditated murder and was sentenced to prison.

It was Morlock who appeared in photographs published in March by two magazines -- Der Spiegel and Rolling Stone -- showing him crouched smiling over the body of a 15-year-old Afghan boy, holding the boy's head up by the hair.

A similar photo was published of another member of the self-styled "kill team," Andrew Holmes, who pleaded guilty last month to a single count of murder and was sentenced to seven years in prison.

The court-martial is expected to run at least to the end of the week at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma.

(Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Greg McCune)

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TiPb TV 22: iHelicopters dogfight

Georgia and Rene go all Airwolf vs. Blue Thunder with iHelicopter, the iPhone-controlled remote helicopters. We’re talking terrifying takeoffs, ludicrous landings, and crazy crashes. This is TiPb TV. Courtesy: iHelicopters iHelicopters sent us two helicopters to test out so we immediately thought — dogfight! The helicopters themselves are...

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The Audio Book Club on This Beautiful Life

Slate editors Emily Bazelon, Josh Levin, and Hanna Rosin discuss Helen Schulman?s new novel, This Beautiful Life, about a viral video which ruins the life of two teenagers at a posh New York City prep school. The novel, set in 2003, explores the still urgent question of what happens when teenagers, with all their impulsive, clueless tendencies, have such free access to technology. Teenager Jake Bergamot forwards to a friend an amateur pornlike video that 13-year-old Daisy Cavanaugh made for him, and the aftermath effectively wrecks his family. Bazelon, an expert on teens and technology, is convinced the novel is faithful to how such events would unfold. Levin is moved by the voice of young Jake and his teenage friends, and Rosin is much less moved by the Bergamot family?s eventual breakup.

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NBA: Kris Humphries Robbed for Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars by His Wedding Guest

Kim Kardashian?s husband Kris Humphries claims he was bilked out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by a guy he invited to his wedding ? a guy who?s been arrested for allegedly running a $1.7 million investment scam. ? Read more after the jump.

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Andrey C. Hicks?was a guest at Kim and?Kris Humphries?televised?wedding bonanza in August ? and sat right behind the happy couple during the?rehearsal dinner.

But TMZ has learned ? after the wedding, Kris learned Andrey was a?target?in a federal investigation in which he?s suspected of raising money for a purported?billion dollar?hedge fund ? that didn?t really exist.

Officials believe Andrey lied to several investors ? including Kris ? telling them, among other things, that he was a Harvard graduate ? when in fact, he was kicked out of the University after 3 semesters for crappy grades. Officials say Andrey only took 1 math class at Harvard ? and got a D-.

Officials claim 27-year-old Hicks stole $1.7 million from various investors ? and sources close to Kris tell us the NBA star accounted for hundreds of thousands of dollars himself.

Hicks was arrested in Canada on Friday and charged with wire fraud. Officials believe he was trying to flee to Switzerland. If convicted, Hicks could face up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

TMZ

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Source: http://www.inflexwetrust.com/2011/10/29/nba-kris-humphries-robbed-for-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars-by-his-wedding-guest/

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Facebook value overstated, study finds

Researchers warn of a social networking bubble in the offing

Web edition : 10:20 am

Claims that Facebook is worth $100 billion or even just $65 billion grossly overvalue the company, say researchers who have done a simple calculation of the company's worth. The pair of econophysicists warns that inflated value estimates for sites such as Facebook, Zynga and Twitter are signs that a social networking financial bubble is gaining steam.

"It's not the same volume of the dot-com bubble. That was really widespread," says coauthor Didier Sornette. Nevertheless, he and colleague Peter Cauwels conclude, a social networking bubble ? and its impending pop ? loom.

The ETH Z?rich researchers argue that determining the value of social networking sites is vastly simpler than with other companies, because there's a relatively direct link between the number of users and profit. This boils the math down to a simple equation: the number of users times the profit per user. Calculated that way, Facebook's value is probably in the neighborhood of $15 billion to $20 billion, the team reports online October 6 at arXiv.org.

Figuring out the number of people with Facebook accounts was easy: The company reported reaching 750 million users in July.

Figuring out how much each user is worth was a little harder. Because the company is private, the researchers had to estimate revenues and profits. Based on reports bandied about by financial industry insiders over the years, the team calculated an average profit margin of 29 percent. This yields an estimated profit per user of $1 per year.

Then the researchers plugged these numbers into some simple growth models. Assuming unlimited exponential growth yields a value of $32.9 billion. But that also quickly inflates the number of users beyond the world's population, which isn't very realistic.

So the team used a more moderate growth calculation that's favored by ecologists to estimate things like rabbit population size, which would grow exponentially if it weren't limited by real-world factors like predators and disease. This trajectory accounts for things that can be expected to slow Facebook's growth, such as future competition or limits to the expansion of Internet access in the developing world.

That approach pegged Facebook's value at somewhere between $15.3 billion and $20.2 billion.

The math used in the assessment is solid, says Theodore Modis, physicist and founder of Growth Dynamics, a strategic forecasting firm based in Lugano, Switzerland. "It's a wonderfully robust result and suggests that the market value for Facebook has been grossly overestimated," he says.

Others find the assessment too simplistic. "The math is interesting, but it's mute about a lot of important things," says marketing scientist Peter Fader of the University of Pennsylvania. For example, the analysis assumes that all Facebook users remain users forever. Customer retention can have a huge influence on a firm's value, says Fader. "This paper doesn't fully account for phenomena that we know exist," he says.


Found in: Numbers and Science & Society

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/335618/title/Facebook_value_overstated,_study_finds

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Sprint claims iPhone users consume much less data than other platforms

Speaking during an earnings call on Wednesday, Sprint CEO, Dan Hesse, not only claimed that iPhone 4S has exceeded all of their expectations, but that iPhones on the Sprint network used much less network resources than users of other smartphone platforms. This is one of the...

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