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 Electronic Arts and Double Fine Productions Inc. has announced that the first downloadable content for the heavy metal inspired third person act…

Taking wi-fi hotspots to the extreme, GM has announced that certain models of their vehicles will feature Autonet, a mobile wi-fi solution built into your car and designed to provide you internet access no matter where you are. It’s only going in certain models, but you can probably get one for that old Monte Carlo if you really want to.

Installation will set you back $500, and will be installed in your new GMC, Chevy, Buick, or Cadillac, setting you back about $29 for 1 GB of service. Go over 1 GB of transfers, and you’re cut off, unless you pay for the 5 GB version. Range is limited to about 150 feet from your vehicle, which would be fine for camping, but you wouldn’t want to use it for torrenting or anything. Or you could just get a Mifi.

[via Autoblog]

Ethorad was the first of a few to write in pointing to an article over at the BBC, highlighting how old songs are finding new life and new sales after showing up in a commercial — or being used on TV during a popular event. In other words, getting your music more widely heard leads to more ways to make money. That, of course, should be obvious. And yet, why is it that so many in the industry are trying to make it so much harder to get music heard by putting up tollbooths at every stop? You have the RIAA/Soundexchange working overtime to put an additional tax on radio play and you have ASCAP/BMI trying to get fees for everything, from the 30 second previews online to ringtones. Of course, the more you put a toll on such things, the less the songs are used, the less they’re promoted and the less opportunity there is to increase sales. It’s really amazing sometimes that these big organizations don’t seem to comprehend the basic idea of a “promotion” and how that helps sales.

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Keep in mind, 100,000 approved apps doesn’t mean 100,000 GOOD apps, but according to the App Shopper, a major milestone has been hit. There are a few technicalities though.

The rules for how health insurers use age to set premium rates vary widely from state to state. Some states require insurers to charge all residents — young and old — the same price.

But in many states, anything goes. Insurers can charge older people five, six or even 10 times more for health insurance than younger adults.

In trying to draft new national standards, the key congressional committees agree that older people should pay more. But they differ widely on just how much more.

The Pool-Party Analogy

So, imagine you’re at a pool party. It’s a mix of people in the neighborhood: some older folks, some middle-aged, new parents with screaming babies, new college grads. They’re all standing around in their bathing suits — itsy-bitsy and the not-so-itsy-bitsy.

For health insurance to work best, all of those people need to get in the pool.

Of course, the older folks jump in first. They’ve got more health problems and really need the insurance. Then, the middle-aged people and parents with young kids jump in. But the younger ones? The ones who are rocking the itsy-bitsy bikinis and board shorts? How do you get them to jump in, especially when the water looks really cold?

That is exactly the problem Congress is trying to figure out.

“There’s no magic involved in how you set premiums,” says Larry Levitt, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation. (KHN is a program of the foundation.)

He says the 20-somethings need to be in the pool because they help balance out the cost of insuring older people who use more medical care.

“You’re still going to have to raise enough money for premiums to pay for the health care services that people use,” he says.

The Debate Over Premiums

And just how do you raise premiums? Should younger people pay less while older people pay more? Or should we share the costs, since we’ll all be old some day?

The bill passed by the Senate Finance Committee would allow insurers to charge older adults four times the amount it charges younger people.

The House bill and the Senate health committee bill make a different choice: They would limit what insurers can charge older adults to two times the amount.

The insurance industry strongly prefers the higher 4-to-1 multiple.

Alissa Fox, senior vice president of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, says the fear is that if you make insurance too expensive for younger adults, they won’t buy it.

“It’s very important to have significant discounts for younger people so they purchase insurance,” Fox says.

What About The 55- to 64-Year-Olds?

But the insurance industry is leaving out a critical element, says Linda Blumberg, a researcher at the Urban Institute. She says the current health overhaul bills all provide subsidies for lower income Americans, and “the young adults tend to be lower income, so they really are buffered a great deal from the full impact.”

Blumberg is worried more about middle-income older Americans — those between 55 and 64 years old. Discounts for younger people mean “surcharges” for older ones — and those older adults are less likely to qualify for a government subsidy.

“More than half of individuals in that 55- to 64-year-old age group with incomes between 400 and 500 percent of the federal poverty level would have household health care financing burdens of 20 percent,” she says.

What Blumberg’s saying is that my mom — before she retired — would have ended up spending 20 percent of her income to buy health insurance. And because she earned too much to qualify for a government subsidy, she would be — as she says — “up a creek.”

Fox says to handle that problem, Congress should give special subsidies to older, middle-income people. But Congress is already apoplectic about the cost of overhauling the health care system, and according to several sources, has little appetite for giving subsidies to people who seem to make a pretty good living — around $54,000 a year.

Individualism Vs. Social Solidarity

There are other ways of getting young people in the pool. You can push them by making the penalties for going uninsured more expensive than a basic plan. The current bills do include penalties, but many economists and the insurance industry claim they’re not high enough to be effective.

You can also require employers to provide health insurance, since the majority of uninsured young people are working. The bills differ on how strongly they do this.

However Congress decides the issue, they could look to other countries that have both universal health care and a private insurance industry. None of them, including Germany and the Netherlands, use age or any other personal characteristic to set premiums.

In the end, this seemingly technical choice of where to set age rates may come down to America’s unique belief in individualism versus the principal of social solidarity.

 

Related KHN stories:

Health Insurance: How Much More Should Older People Pay?

People Who Choose Not To Have Health Insurance

Laura C. Trueman has spent much of her career promoting affordable health care.  Now, she wishes she could find some herself. 

Laid off from her marketing job at a managed-care company late last year, Trueman was able to keep her health insurance thanks to a provision in the federal stimulus bill that gave furloughed workers the right to purchase their old employer-based coverage at a 65% discount.  The subsidies, which last up to nine months, were designed to give workers like Trueman time to get back on their feet.

Today, with the job market weak, Trueman is still without a job, and her family is bracing for an uncertain future. With the subsidies, she and her husband, a self-employed attorney were paying a manageable $460 a month for their health insurance; starting Dec. 1, the cost jumps to $1,313.   They can ill afford the increase.  They’re already having trouble making their mortgage payment, and fear they might lose their Northern Virginia home.

“It has really made a huge difference for us,” she says of the insurance assistance, adding that the higher payment “would be a real stretch.” 

Since 1985, a law known as COBRA has given laid off-workers the right to hold onto their employer-based health insurance for up to 18 months so long as they continue to pay the premiums, including payments that their employers used to make on their behalf.

In the past very few people could afford this option, but the government subsidies have changed that, and now enrollments appear to be growing sharply. Hewitt Associates, a Lincolnshire, Ill., consulting firm, recently estimated that the rate at which workers were opting for coverage under COBRA had doubled compared with pre-subsidy levels.

Although federal officials do not have figures on the number of people participating in the program, millions have been eligible. The law covers anyone laid off between Sept. 1 of last year and Dec. 31 of this year.

But with the first discounts having gone into effect March 1, many people are about to see the benefit expire, including many who remain unemployed. The Obama administration and some members of Congress are talking about  whether to extend the subsidy.  Some lawmakers aren’t enthused because of budget concerns, but backers say the subsidy is a crucial lifeline for people still hunting for jobs.

Just this week, Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Penn., introduced legislation that would extend from 9 to 15 months the total allowable time an unemployed worker and her family could receive the subsidized COBRA assistance. The legislation would also extend the subsidies to people laid off through June 30, 2010, widening the window of eligibility by six months. A third provision would give an extra six months of undiscounted COBRA coverage to people who were laid off early in 2008 before the subsidy law took effect.

“Federal subsidies for COBRA premiums are making insurance more affordable for millions of unemployed individuals and their families,” says Rep. Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat. “This is not the time for those who have lost their jobs to have to worry about an impending drastic increase in their health insurance costs. Congress should extend these subsidies so the number of uninsured does not grow even further.”

For now, the aid is helping a broad cross section of people with widely varying health and financial situations — from newly minted MBAs to older workers forced out of their jobs after exhausting their disability leave, among other reasons.

A Twitter account that tracks news and personal experiences with the subsidy has garnered scores of followers. 

Out-of-work professionals are blogging about the issue for the Wall Street Journal. 

“I can only be grateful that I am safeguarded by COBRA,” writes a furloughed operations manager at Bank of America, “and hope that I am employed and eligible for medical insurance through my new employer before my COBRA term ends.”

Close to home

My own family got seven months of discounted coverage out of the program after I lost my job as a newspaper reporter last year. The savings: a cool $6,000.  While I am still looking for permanent work, my wife was recently able to find a job with benefits.  (The discounts end when you become eligible for other insurance, either directly or through your spouse.)

People in the same boat seem to be everywhere. The firm my former company hired to administer the discount program was so flooded with work that it ended up hiring temporary workers – including one that I spoke with who had herself been recently laid off and was looking to take advantage of the subsidy.

But in many cases, the subsidies are, at best, only temporarily easing the stresses facing employees who have been laid off.

A joint study by the American Cancer Society and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that many chronically ill people could not even afford the subsidized premiums. (KHN is a program of the foundation.) Once the full COBRA premiums are reinstated, the study found, many cancer patients face becoming uninsured or forgoing needed treatments.

Indeed, people who become eligible for COBRA are generally older and sicker than the rest of the work force, and have fewer insurance options when they lose their jobs.

You can try to purchase insurance on your own, although that is generally more expensive than an employer-sponsored plan and often comes with limits on basic coverage such as maternity care or prescription drugs.   Some – but not all — states provide a backstop in the form of “high-risk pools” that offer insurance to people who can’t get coverage elsewhere because of their medical history. 

Dale Gardner, who lost his job at a high-technology firm in Virginia last November, says the subsidies have been welcome. 

At the same time, he says that he has been able to replace much of his lost income as a consultant, and that he would not mind paying full freight so long as he can keep his coverage under COBRA.  What worries him the most, he says, is that he won’t be able to find a job with benefits before his right to coverage under an even un-subsidized COBRA expires in 2010.

“Because of our health history,” he says, “coverage for my wife and I is going to be difficult to find at any price.” He says his wife has arthritis and one of his sons has asthma.

“I count myself as fortunate,” he adds. “I have been able to maintain coverage despite the fact that my family has health problems. (But) there are a lot of people who cannot even get that who have worse health problems.”

Some experts say those problems point up the need for broader-based reform of the health-care system.  The subsidies have been “a valuable first step” helping people in need keep their insurance, says Karyn Schwartz, a health-policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation.  “Providing security for all of those who need health insurance will require more comprehensive reform,” Schwartz adds.

Trueman, 51, was laid off in December 2008, after working a year at a unit of UnitedHealth Group that provides managed care for Medicaid enrollees in 20 states.  Before that, she was the executive director of the Coalition for Affordable Health Coverage, a Washington-based industry advocacy group. 

With her background in health policy, she figured getting a new job would be “relatively quick and painless.” But that has not been the case. “I have had a lot of interviews,” she says, “but just clinching the right one has not happened.”

Down the road, she worries most about a son in college who has a chronic health condition that requires medication. That could make it hard for the whole family to find insurance in the private market. Another problem is that her home state of Virginia is one that does not have a public program for “high-risk” individuals. 

Seeking to exhaust all options, she has lately been reading up on how some drug companies give discounts to the poor or uninsured, to see if her son might qualify.

Come December, when the COBRA discounts expire, “I don’t really know what we will do,” Trueman says. “I hope we have a job by then that has health insurance.”

A helmet-mounted radar unit seems redundant with the kind of crazy surveillance and intel they already have available or in the pipes, but hey, whatever helps our boys. While satellite and air-based imaging are invaluable to the modern field commander, an individual infantryman has little feedback in an more local tactical situation. So why not have an imaging system for individuals?

The Helmet Mounted Radar System (HMRS) is “a miniature, low power, near 360-degree field of view Moving Target Indicator (MTI) radar sensor that will alert the soldier to the whereabouts of a target out to at least 25 meters.” 25m isn’t very far, but providing even a hint of a nearby enemy could be the difference between life and death. The only trouble, it seems to me, is that the modern soldier is going to be so weighed down with all the gadgets and armor made to save his life that he won’t be able to maneuver.

Not to mention, this may lead to extremely scary moments like that part in Alien where the guy is in the tunnels and IT’S RIGHT BEHIND YOU AAAAAARGH

[via Gizmodo]

There’s been some talk of having the government bail out newspapers or somehow fundamentally support newspapers. Of course, for good reason, that scares a lot of people who believe that news organizations (not just newspapers, mind you) play an important role in acting as a government corruption watchdog. So it’s interesting to see a new study that found that the more government support the press gets, the less they covered government scandals. Of course, this is a correlation — so it’s entirely possible that governments that support the press are simply less corrupt and less prone to scandal. However, the study did look at the timing of gov’t funding as compared to press coverage which suggests that there might be a causal relationship, as the lower incidence of press coverage for gov’t scandals tended to lag funding slightly. There are still some questions, but this certainly suggests that if you believe news organizations are important in holding government accountable, pushing for gov’t support may not be a good idea.

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Homebrew coder maRk2512 has released a new version of Stone Age, a homebrew game remake of the classic Amiga game for the Nintendo DS. The latest upda…

With so many organizations trying to use copyright and trademark law to take content offline, the EFF is announcing the launch of its new Takedown Hall Of Shame, highlighting “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse.” You’ll recognize the names on the list — as every one of them we’ve written about here. Who knows if this will cause lawyers to think twice before issuing bogus takedowns (I doubt it), but at least it should shine some light on how widely copyright and trademark law are abused to stifle speech.

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A few weeks back, I wrote about the impending release of several of the MechWarrior 4 games. The release was supposed to be timed with the 25th anniversary of the Battletech games. While it was not released in time due to the quintessential problem of free projects (real life financial demands imposing themselves on the dev team), MekTek.net has not reneged on their promise of releasing the games for free. Meanwhile, they’ve redesigned their site and released an open beta version of their Assault Tech 1: Battletech project.

Details—and a video link of the downloadable PC game—after the jump.

Mektek.net surely has gotten an overhaul yesterday — the site now has a brand new interface; it even shows a short animation clip of a Vulture (if memory serves). It also has a link to its YouTube channel.

>>>MekTek.net

>>>Battletech – MechWarrior 4 downloadable full version free FPS PC game release update: MekTek post #1

>>>Battletech – MechWarrior 4 downloadable full version free FPS PC game release update: MekTek post #2

>>>See my review of the demo version of Battletech – MechWarrior 4 downloadable full version free FPS PC game HERE

>>>More downloadable full version free FPS PC games HERE

Earlier this month, BBC Audiobooks America started an audiobook project based on Twitter messages where Neil Gaiman kicked off an exquisite corpse process of stringing together about 1,000 Tweets to forge a storyline. Dozens of Twitter users contributed tweets to be edited into a coherent plot that will be released as a free audiobook download. From this publicity stunt, an approximately 50-page book (or 2-hr audiobook, actually) has been created from Gaiman’s fans. And presumably, the collection of tweets could also be remixed and edited — and improved — to possibly gain further participation from Gaiman (who contributed the first line of the story and will read aloud the completed audiobook) and the attention of any number of other authors. It’s not exactly a brand-new idea to compose a story in this way, but it’s a very interesting way to advertise and connect with fans to whet their appetites for more content to come (and even pay for).

However, the crowdsourcing aspect of this particular audiobook has been criticized in detail for exhibiting the worst of literary clichés as well as a meandering plot with too many characters and unresolved arcs. But generalizing this crowd’s apparently unsatisfying result to all possible collaborative-author processes seems a bit disingenuous. Perhaps it’s one of my pet peeves, but the schadenfreude surrounding crowdsourced works that aren’t “as good as Shakespeare” seems to focus too much on some artificial failure, and not the potential or the realized successes. Maybe fiction isn’t the best target for collaborative authorship, but the suggestion that collaborative writing won’t ever work for good storytelling is far from proven. In fact, many popular stories (TV shows, etc) are written by teams of authors. (So the question could be posed: where does the optimal number of authors arise?) Conversely, the overwhelming number of unsuccessful stories written by single authors should not discourage writers from working alone, either. Bad stories happen.

The real triumph of this crowdwork is that this experiment engaged with its audience and promoted Gaiman and BBCAA for future works. From the BBC’s perspective, a ton of content was generated largely for free, and a promotional audiobook was created in just a few days. Had the BBC commissioned a single author to compose a similar work, there wouldn’t be any guarantees of a compelling book in the end. And working with a single author might require more complex licensing rights and royalties. So crowdsourcing this project sounds like an advertising coup — generating a promotion appropriately disguised as free content. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s a whole lot better than a banner ad, right?

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Sony has announced that the God of War Collection has officially gone gold and is now   scheduled for shipping  on November 17. The ac…

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Every month or so, someone reads my recommendations for vegans, checks out some vegan multivitamins, and then writes me asking about the high levels (many times the RDA) of some individual vitamins in many of the vegan multivitamins.

While I’m not aware that taking B vitamins and vitamin C in the amounts found in typical vegan multis poses any sort of health problem, I thought it might interest readers to hear what supplements I take.

For vitamin B12 and calcium, I drink about 1 to 1.5 glasses of fortified soymilk each day. In the past, I have taken a Trader Joe’s 500 mg calcium / 250 mg magnesium/ 7.5 zinc supplement on days I didn’t drink enough soymilk; but lately I’ve been taking it every day. I also take a 1,000 mcg B12 supplement about once a week.

For vitamin D, I try to sit out in the sun for 20 minutes each day (10 minutes facing the sun, 10 minutes facing away). I save any reading that I can do away from the computer for this time each day. I normally get a lot of sun on the weekends. During the dead of winter, I have a vitamin D lamp that I sit in front of for about 10 minutes a day. Vitamin D2 supplements should be fine – I don’t think every vegan needs to run out and get a vitamin D lamp for the winter. I tend to suffer from (self-diagnosed) seasonal affective disorder, so I like the lamp. Until a year ago, I was living in Sacramento where there was plenty of sun throughout the year, but now that I live in Oakland, which can be a lot more cloudy, I have found that I need more light during the winter.

For iodine, I take a 225 mcg supplement every few days. I pop one when I realize that I haven’t in awhile.

For omega-3s, I am a bit of an anomaly, and do not strictly adhere to my own recommendations. Around 2002, I had my prothrombin time tested just to see where it was. Prothrombin time is a measure of how fast your blood clots. Being a vegan, I wanted to make sure I was getting enough omega-3 and that my blood wasn’t clotting too fast. Well, it turned out that it was actually clotting too slowly (but not by much). I had been taking 1 tsp of flaxseed per day for some time (a couple years). I’m not sure if that was related, but I decided to stop supplementing as omega-3s slow blood-clotting time. I have had my prothrombin time tested a few times since then and it is always just a tiny bit slower than normal. So for omega-3s, I will take a DHA tablet once in awhile, but by no means on a daily basis as I recommend for other vegans. I do eat canola oil regularly, which has omega-3s, but not nearly as much as flaxseed oil.

I drink about 4 oz of carrot juice a day to make sure I’m getting beta-carotene.

And that’s it. I hope I haven’t raised more questions than I’ve answered!

I don’t know how you could forget, considering we’ve been posting Droid updates just about every day, but according to our calculations, tomorrow is October 28th: the day Droid drops. Now, we don’t expect the Droid to set the mobile world on its head exactly, but we’re pretty sure that it’s going to be the premiere Android device — until the next premiere device comes out.

While there are still debates over proposals for a federal shield law to protect journalists from having to reveal sources, California already has a shield law for journalists, but what good does it do if authorities totally ignore it. It seems that may have happened in the case of TMZ’s Harvey Levin and the Los Angeles County Sheriff obtaining Levin’s phone records in trying to track down who leaked information about actor Mel Gibson’s arrest. Levin is pointing out that this does, in fact, appear to violate both state and federal law and is apparently working with lawyers over this. While the Sheriff’s department says it spoke with a prosecutor and got a judge’s approval to get the records, it’s difficult to see how that fits with California’s shield law.

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We were just hit up by a new Verizon connect and it looks like the LG Chocolate Touch is on the horizon. We’re told that retail stores should be receiving stock within the next two weeks, which makes sense since it was featured in Verizon’s Holiday Lineup list. In case you missed the details, the Chocolate Touch will pack a 3.2 megapixel camera, EV-DO Rev. 0 (they couldn’t get with the times and get Rev. A?), Visual Voicemail and VZ Navigator. We’re not sure how we feel about the design, especially with LG offerings like the BL20 and BL40, you’d think this fresh new touch screen wouldn’t look like it was designed in the late 90s. It also looks like it’s packing the same tired OS which will look even more dead once Droid/s hit the scene, but with the right pricing we think this could do well with those who aren’t looking for full-featured smartphones. Hit the jump for a shot of the back.