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Apple says it's lost money on repairs over the last decade
The right to repair movement is mad as hell as companies work to prevent owners from doing basic repairs to their own devices. One of the biggest targets for the public's ire is Apple, which is accused of going out of its way to make user repairs as difficult as possible. That, coupled with the seemingly-increased failure rate of these devices has caused enough of a fuss that Congress is demanding answers.
NASA to launch Hubble space telescope successor in 2018, will clean its room later
You know you're going to miss the Hubble Space Telescope once ceases operation and they let it simply burn up in orbit. But don't cry, dry your eye, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has announced plans to put its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, in orbit in 2018. The telescope, which will be 100 times more sensitive than the Hubble, faced being cut completely by a Congressional subcommittee earlier this year as a result of budget constraints given its $8.8 billion price tag. After much Capital Hill grilling over the project being billions over budget, NASA has moved is scheduled launch -- initially set for 2013 -- to October of 2018. Although not the best news, it'll still get up there and you can hug your Hubble plushie tightly tonight knowing distant worlds will be that much closer.
Siri may pose 'competitive threat' to Google, Eric Schmidt tells Senate subcommittee
Back in September, Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt sat down before a Senate antitrust subcommittee to discuss his company's competitive practices. As you would expect from anyone in his situation, Schmidt spent much of his time defending Mountain View's position atop the search industry, and cited several competitors as evidence of its fair play. The exec's list of "threats" featured some of the usual suspects, including Bing, Yahoo and Amazon, as well as Siri. "Even in the few weeks since the hearing, Apple has launched an entirely new approach to search technology with Siri, its voice-activated search and task-completion service built into the iPhone 4S," he wrote, pointing to a handful of publications that characterized Apple's voice assistant as a "Google Killer" and Cupertino's "entry point" into the search market. "Apple's Siri is a significant development -- a voice-activated means of accessing answers through iPhones that demonstrates the innovations in search," Schmidt explained. "Google has many strong competitors and we sometimes fail to anticipate the competitive threat posed by new methods of accessing information." Granted, it's not terribly surprising to hear Google talk up its competition -- especially before a panel of politicians devoted to rooting out anti-competitive practices. Yet Schmidt's comments do mark a noticeable shift from the stance he assumed last year, when he denied that Apple and Facebook posed a "competitive threat" to Google's search operations. As he admitted, "My statement was clearly wrong." Check out the full hearing at the source link below.
