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Apple is going to make my new iPad obsolete. Againds
Guess what I got over the holidays? Yep, a new iPad Air 2.
So now, of course, Apple is expected to unveil an even newer 9.7-inch iPad just three months later. This iPad, which should be unveiled at the company's Monday event, is likely to add a connector for a keyboard like the larger iPad Pro and to feature other upgrades such as compatibility with its stylus, the Apple Pencil. All of a sudden, I've got iPad envy again.
Enlarge Image
I JUST got this thing.
Sarah Tew/CNET
This rumored iPad raises the possibility of a worrisome trend. Apple may be looking at multiple versions of its marquee tablet throughout the year, forcing consumers to grapple with a more complex equation of when and which products they want to buy. That only feeds into the growing sense of buyer's remorse about missing out on the next, better thing.
Apple is also expected to unveil a new, smaller iPhone at the event. (For all the details as they're announced, tune into CNET's live coverage on Monday starting at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET.) So you too might feel a pang of regret if you've recently bought a sizable iPhone 6S but would have preferred its features in a more petite package.
Apple declined to comment ahead of the event.
I'm by no means an opponent of progress. I understand that tech gadgets need to get faster and smarter and include more features over time. But Apple consumers have generally settled into a pattern in which the Cupertino, California, company debuts its new iPhones and iPads around September or October. That kind of predictability is one of the advantages that Apple has had over Android -- you generally know that you're going to have the latest and greatest product for a year if you get one over the holidays.
The iPad Air 2 is a slightly different case. That tablet debuted in fall 2014, so I get that it's a little long in the tooth. Yet when Apple's September 2015 event came and went without a refresh to its mainstay 9.7-inch product, I felt certain that there wouldn't be a significant upgrade anytime soon. I'll bet that there are many others who read the signals the same way.
It looks like I'm going to be proven wrong on Monday. Depending on how you look at it, the upgrade is coming either too soon or too late.
Apple, after all, did unveil a new tablet in September. But the larger iPad Pro was designed more for business users and hasn't really appealed to mainstream consumers. Yes, size matters, and I wasn't ready for such an unwieldy tablet. Given the tablet sales numbers from Apple, I'm not alone there.
The company even bumped up the specifications for a new iPad Mini 4 in September, offering fans of the smaller tablet a fresh option. So you can't blame me for assuming no new 9.7-inch iPad when the event came and went with little mention of the iPad Air line.
This may be a blip in Apple's schedule of new products. Perhaps next year, the company will go back to unveiling its key products in the latter part of the year.
But for now, I'm wondering if I should be trading in my recently obtained iPad Air 2 for the newer model.
Campaign squabble turns violent; state rep's daughter chargedgd
Donald Trump on Mitt Romney: ‘Are You Sure He’s a Mormon?’bfg
Donald J. Trump, left, and Mitt Romney in 2012 in Las Vegas, after Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Romney for the presidency.Credit Michael Nelson/European Pressphoto Agency
Speaking in Salt Lake City — home to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ headquarters — Donald J. Trump questioned Mitt Romney’s membership in the faith on Friday, asking a crowd at a rally, “Are you sure he’s a Mormon?”
Mr. Romney, who was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, comes from a prominent Mormon family, and he remains popular in Utah, which has a sizable Mormon population.
After first praising Mormons generally — “And do I love the Mormons, O.K.?” Mr. Trump said. “Do I love the Mormons?” — Mr. Trump added that he has many friends in Salt Lake City. But he noted pointedly that Mr. Romney, who has been urging Republicans to deny him the presidential nomination, is not one of them.
“Did he choke? Did this guy choke? He’s a choke artist,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Mr. Romney’s loss to President Obama in 2012. Mr. Trump added, “Are you sure he’s a Mormon? Are we sure?”
Though Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Romney in 2012, the two men are far from friendly now. Earlier this month, Mr. Romney delivered a scathing broadside against Mr. Trump, calling him “a fraud” and “a phony” and urging the Republican Party to unite around an alternative candidate.
And on Friday, Mr. Romney, who owns a home in Holladay, Utah, wrote in a Facebook message that he planned to vote for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in the state’s Republican caucus Tuesday, as part of an effort to deny Mr. Trump the party’s nomination at its convention in July.
Mr. Trump has questioned the religious affiliation of his rivals before, including Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, who is a Seventh-Day Adventist. But after Pope Francis recently suggested that Mr. Trump was not Christian because of his promise to build a wall along the Mexican border, the real estate mogul took offense, saying it was “disgraceful” for a religious leader to question someone else’s faith.
In his remarks Friday evening, Mr. Trump also criticized Mr. Cruz. “Is he really a natural born citizen? I mean, give me a break,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Mr. Cruz, who was born in Canada and recently renounced his Canadian citizenship. “He was a citizen of Canada, can you believe it?
“He was a joint — he was U.S. and he was Canada,” Mr. Trump continued. “And you know, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work. You’re supposed to be born, like, here.”
Find out what you need to know about the 2016 presidential race today, and get politics news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the First Draft newsletter.
Double fly-by of comets to zoom past earth dSnext week
On Monday, at 8.14 am, comet 252P/LINEAR will pass within 3.3 million miles of earth. With the upcoming encounter, the comet will become the fifth-closest comet to pass by our earth. Then at 10.30 am Tuesday, comet P/2016 BA14 will pass within 2.1 million miles, the third-closest comet since 1770.
Michael S. P. Kelley of the University of Maryland said that there are chances that he could be wrong, but he thinks that they both are linked. Kelley affirmed that he has booked the Hubble Space Telescope for nine hours, so he could observe 252P when it passes by earth.
As per astronomers, the close pass by is considered to be 'rare and unusual'. It supports the idea that they both have separated at some point. In 2000, 252P was discovered by MIT astronomers and BA14 was first spotted from the Hawaiian observatory Pan-STARRS.
Paul Chodas, manager at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Objects, was of the view, "We know comets are relatively fragile things. ... During a previous pass through the inner-solar system, or during a distant fly-by of Jupiter, a chunk that we now know of as BA14 might have broken off of 252P".
Chodas further added that the comets do not pose threat to earth. In fact, the fly-bys are considered as an excellent opportunity for scientific advancement on the study of comets.
Gareth V. Williams, associate director of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, said that scientists need to know about comet BA14's orbit before astronomers can concluded both are related to each other.
A report published in the TechTimes News said, "The pair of comets due to pass by Earth are traveling along nearly-identical orbits in their paths around the sun. This discovery, revealed through observations taken at the Discovery Channel Telescope (DCT), suggests the two bodies may have once been parts of a larger object that broke apart."
"We know comets are relatively fragile things, as in 1993 when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was discovered and its pieces linked to a flyby of Jupiter. Perhaps during a previous pass through the inner-solar system, or during a distant flyby of Jupiter, a chunk that we now know of as BA14 might have broken off of 252P," said Paul Chodas of Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"Comet P/2016 BA14 was discovered on Jan. 22, 2016, by the University of Hawaii's PanSTARRS telescope on Haleakala, on the island of Maui. It was initially thought to be an asteroid, but follow-up observations by a University of Maryland and Lowell Observatory team with the Discovery Channel Telescope showed a faint tail, revealing that the discovery was, in fact, a comet. The orbit of this newly discovered comet, however, held yet another surprise. Comet P/2016 BA14 follows an unusually similar orbit to that of comet 252P/LINEAR, which was discovered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey on April 7, 2000," according to a news report published by Phys.
"Comet P/2016 BA14 is possibly a fragment of 252P/LINEAR. The two could be related because their orbits are so remarkably similar," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center of NEO Studies (CNEOS) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We know comets are relatively fragile things, as in 1993 when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was discovered and its pieces linked to a flyby of Jupiter. Perhaps during a previous pass through the inner-solar system, or during a distant flyby of Jupiter, a chunk that we now know of as BA14 might have broken off of 252P."
In a report published by the DailyMail, "Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) discovered the 750-foot-large object on April 7, 2000. They say it will pass Earth at roughly 3.3 million miles away. Another comet was discovered just a few months ago, spotted by researchers at the University of Hawaii's PanSTARRS telecope on Haleakala, on the island of Maui, on January 22, 2016."
Pluto is defying scientists’ expectations in soX many ways.0
“A better question would be, ‘What isn’t puzzling or mysterious?’ Because that’s a much shorter list,” said Stern, the planetary scientist in charge of the mission. “Almost everything we see on Pluto and in its atmosphere is puzzling.”
After traveling through the solar system for nine years, the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to the Pluto system last July. Equipped with seven extremely sensitive scientific instruments, it took high-resolution images of the dwarf planet’s surface features, observed its five satellites, monitored its atmosphere and measured its interaction with the solar wind — all as it whizzed past its targets at speeds of up to 30,800 mph.
A suite of five papers published this week in the journal Science illuminate some of the findings from this data, as well as some of the mysteries.
So far, the spacecraft has transmitted back to Earth just 40 percent of the data it collected. Scientists say most of it has defied their expectations.
“There really wasn’t much that turned out the way we thought it would,” said planetary scientist Randy Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., a co-investigator on the mission.
One of the biggest surprises was the diversity of landscapes on the dwarf planet’s surface.
In a paper about the geology of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, scientists described an ancient, heavily cratered terrain on the dwarf planet’s surface that could be 4 billion years old. But they also spotted wide, smooth plains that look as if they are still being resurfaced today.
Elsewhere, the study authors saw towering mountains of water ice measuring 2 to 3 miles high, and evidence of active glaciers made of nitrogen that are carving wide troughs across parts of Pluto’s exterior.
And then there are the features that no one can quite make sense of — regions with parallel ridges and grooves that the scientists are calling “washboard terrain,” and narrow ridges that are oriented north to south that have been dubbed “bladed terrain.”
“We’ve got several hypotheses floating around on the team, but there’s not a lot of convergence or consensus on how these might have formed,” said Jeff Moore of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., who led the geological study.
Moore explained that even though the temperature on Pluto’s surface averages just 40 degrees above absolute zero (nearly minus-400 degrees Fahrenheit), the dwarf planet is hardly frozen in time.
The slow decay of radioactive materials embedded in the silicate rock that makes up most of Pluto’s interior produces a meager amount of heat that eventually makes its way to the surface. That energy, coupled with a bit of warmth from the distant sun, can be enough to mobilize the nitrogen glaciers and fuel other geological changes on the Pluto.
Charon, too, turned out to be significantly more geologically active than the researchers had anticipated.
“We expected it would be a boring cratered ball,” Moore said. “Instead we can see there was a lot going on geologically in its early history.”
Moore said Charon’s southern hemisphere showed more signs of recent resurfacing than the northern hemisphere. The researchers think this could be the result of cryovolcanism, a process similar to volcanoes on Earth except they emit water and other volatile compounds instead of molten rock.
And there were more surprises as well: Hal Weaver, a co-investigator on the mission from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said his team was shocked by how reflective the surfaces of Pluto’s four small moons — Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra — turned out to be.
For example, if the surface of our moon were as reflective as the surface of Hydra, it would be about 10 times brighter, he said.
Weaver said his team is still trying to work out how these surfaces have remained so bright after 4 billion years of exposure to cosmic rays, ions in the solar wind, ultraviolet light and collisions with debris from the surrounding Kuiper belt — all of which should have caused them to grow darker.
He said the group was also surprised that the rotation rates of the various moons are not even remotely in sync. The four small moons behave like spinning tops, rotating about their axes much faster than they revolve around the system’s center of mass.
Hydra, the outermost moon, is the dizziest of them all, completing a rotation in only 10.3 hours.
Another research team led by Gladstone determined that Pluto’s atmosphere is not escaping nearly as fast as was expected, especially considering the dwarf planet’s small size and that its gravity is much weaker than that of Earth or Mars. The New Horizons data also suggest a possible explanation for this: The atmosphere at the highest altitudes is much colder than scientists had predicted, and that could keep Pluto’s gases in place.
“It’s always fun to have your models validated, but it is way more fun to have them trashed,” Gladstone said. “Finding out you are completely wrong is a great part of science.”
As to what might be cooling off the atmosphere, scientists said they are still not sure.
New Horizons also detected about 20 thin, distinct layers in the haze on Pluto that researchers cannot yet explain.
There were other surprises as well. A look at the surface composition of the dwarf planet revealed that the changes in brightness across different regions are among the most extreme in the solar system.
“In just about every discipline, it was like, ‘Wow, holy cow, what’s up with that?’” Gladstone said.
For the most part, the researchers expressed delight that their expectations were so wrong.
“A lot of us were inspired to go into science to puzzle out mysterious things,” Moore said. “In that case, Pluto is a gold mine.”
Interested in Apple's rumored 4-inch iPhone SE? Check out these Androids first.0k
But Apple won't be the only one that makes petite phones. Though they aren't as popular as the sizes we see today (these days, a 5- to 5.7-inch handset is considered normal), they certainly exist and from a wide variety of manufacturers.
We rounded up some of our favorite compact Android devices (most of which land right around the 4.5-inch mark) in case you were keen on a smaller size but not with Apple's iOS mobile software.
Obama, Republicans take Supreme Court fight to airwaves./k;
By Associated Press March 19 at 6:06 AM
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama called again Saturday for Senate Republicans to consider his nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland.
Republicans countered by warning Democrats not to “seek to further divide our nation” by using the Supreme Court fight “to score cheap political points in an election year.”
In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama acknowledged that “we’re in the middle of an especially noisy and volatile political season.”
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However, the president argued: “At a time when our politics are so polarized; when norms and customs of our political rhetoric seem to be corroding - this is precisely the time we should treat the appointment of a Supreme Court justice with the seriousness it deserves. Because our Supreme Court is supposed to be above politics, not an extension of politics. And it should stay that way.”
Obama urged Senate Republicans to “give Judge Garland the respect he has earned. Give him a hearing. Give him an up-or-down vote. To deny it would be an abdication of the Senate’s constitutional duty. It would indicate a process for nominating and confirming judges that is beyond repair.”
In the GOP response, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said the battle over the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia was unique because an Obama choice would push the court’s 4-4 split in the liberal direction and because the vacancy occurred “in the middle of an election year.” Scalia died Feb. 13.
Tillis repeated the GOP argument that they would give voters a chance to decide the next justice by postponing action until the president elected in November makes a choice. He never mentioned Garland, whom Obama nominated Wednesday.
“The president and Democratic leaders aren’t exactly thrilled with giving the American people a voice,” said Tillis, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Tillis said Republicans were already moving on to addressing drug addiction and the needs of the military and veterans and said the next move was up to Obama and congressional Democrats.
“Will they join us in doing our jobs on behalf of the American people?” he said. “Or will they instead seek to further divide our nation by turning the Supreme Court process into a blatantly partisan back and forth? Are they going to resort to blocking and sabotaging important legislation and good-faith efforts to help the American people, all in the name of seeking to score cheap political points in an election year?”
Shortly after Scalia’s death, Tillis cautioned Republicans against ruling out any Obama choice before he announced it, citing the unlikely scenario that the president would pick a candidate as conservative as Scalia. Tillis said a blanket refusal could seem “obstructionist.”
On Friday, Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk became the first GOP senator to publicly abandon his party leaders’ insistence on blocking the process until a new president makes a nomination.
“It’s just man up and cast a vote,” Kirk said on the “’Big’ John Howell” show on Chicago radio station WLS. “The tough thing about these senatorial jobs is you get yes or no votes. Your whole job is to either say yes or no and explain why.”
Kirk faces a tough re-election contest this fall and is considered one of the most endangered Senate GOP incumbents.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Investigators search for cause of deadly plane crashkh..
The cause of the crash was not immediately determined, but Golubev said: "By all appearances, the cause of the air crash was the strongly gusting wind, approaching a hurricane level."
Russian investigators said they were looking into adverse weather and a possible pilot error as the most likely causes of the crash.
According to the weather data reported by Russian state television, winds at the moment of the crash at an altitude of 1,640 feet and higher were around 67 miles per hour.
Ian Petchenik, a spokesman for the flight-tracking website Flightradar24, told The Associated Press that the plane missed its approach then entered a holding pattern.
According to Flightradar24, the plane circled for about two hours before making another attempt to land. It said a Russian Aeroflot plane scheduled to land around the same time made three landing attempts but then diverted to another airport.
According to its data, the Dubai plane began climbing again after a go-around when it suddenly started to fall with vertical speed of up to 21,000 feet per minute.
The closed-circuit TV footage showed the plane going down in a steep angle and exploding in a huge fireball that lit up the night sky.
Some Russian aviation experts said the steep descent appeared to indicate that the crash most probably have been caused by a gust of wind.
"It was an uncontrollable fall," said Sergei Kruglikov, a veteran Russian pilot, said on Russian state television. He said that a sudden change in wind speed and direction could have caused the wings to abruptly lose their lifting power.
Several planes had landed in Rostov-on-Don shortly before the Dubai airliner was scheduled to touch down, but other flights later were diverted.
Another seasoned pilot, Viktor Zabolotsky, said a gust of wind probably caused the airliner to lose speed and crash as the pilot was making an attempt to go round.
President Vladimir Putin offered his condolences to the victims' families and top Russian Cabinet officials flew to the crash site to oversee the investigation.
Officials said the plane and bodies of the victims were torn into small pieces by the powerful blast, but investigators already have found the plane's cockpit conversation recorder and another one recording parameters of the flight.
It was FlyDubai's first crash since the budget carrier began operating in 2009. It was launched in 2008 by the government of Dubai, the Gulf commercial hub that is part of the seven-state United Arab Emirates federation. The carrier has been flying to Rostov-on-Don since 2013.
The airline shares a chairman with Dubai's government-backed Emirates, the Middle East's biggest airline, though the two carriers operate independently and maintain separate operations from their bases at Dubai International Airport, the region's busiest airport.
FlyDubai's fleet consisted of relatively young 737-800 aircraft, like the one that crashed. The airline says it operates more than 1,400 flights a week.
The airline has expanded rapidly in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. Dubai is a popular tourist destination for Russian visitors, who are attracted by its beaches, shopping malls and year-round sunshine. Many Russian expatriates live and work in Dubai, a city where foreigners outnumber locals more than 4-to-1.
FlyDubai has a good safety record. In January 2015, one of its planes was struck on the fuselage by what appeared to small-arms fire shortly before it landed in Baghdad. That flight landed safely with no major injuries reported
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