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I was almost sideswiped by another driver on Interstate 95 today. He missed me by a couple of inches and I looked over with alarm as he passed to see him looking down into his lap and not out the windshield. No proof, naturally, but it's a safe bet he was texting on his cell phone. If fact, I had been watching him in my mirror as he approached from behind in the passing lane, and his directional control was marginal, to say the least. Who among us has not been witness to an inattentive driver using a cell, whether...

Sometimes, the best way to get a handle on the unpredictable is to label it with a completely random numerical value. Oddsmaking is a combination of magical thinking, intuition and sheer chance. With that in mind, here are the odds that Vegas bookmakers might want to give to the following world events: 1. North Korea starts a war with South Korea: 10% My biggest fear is that the West believes that North Korea does not actually feel threatened and is simply posturing. But that assumption has almost never, ever held water for any conflicts. It's been a huge blind spot;...

First, if you follow the link, you'll find that this does not appear to be an April Fools prank. Nuance on Monday launched Voice Ads, a voice enabled ad platform that allows a consumer to talk to brands. Companies get a new monetization vehicle and consumers presumably will get a say in brand advertising delivery. snip"Nuance, which is using its voice technology in mobile, health and auto applications, is obviously hoping to get on the ad gravy train. Voice Ads promise to give marketers an avenue "to deepen the relationship with their consumers." The theory is that you'll chat with...

Here’s an easy way to get some cash: Drop a used smartphone in any of the 13 ATM-like kiosks at shopping malls around the Washington region and, within minutes, the machine will spit out as much as a few hundred dollars. The process is so simple that local police fear these ecoATMs are fueling one of the nation’s most pervasive criminal trends — cellphone theft. The kiosks have become a particular thorn for police in the District, where 40 percent of all forced robberies last year involved a cellphone, the highest percentage in the nation. In a recent investigation, D.C....

On Wednesday, the CIA's chief technology officer detailed the Agency's vision for collecting and analyzing all of the information people put on the Internet. The wide-ranging presentation at GigaOM's Structure:Data conference in New York City came two days after it was reported the spy agency is on the verge of signing a cloud computing contract with Amazon — worth up to $600 million over 10 years — that involves Amazon Web Services helping the CIA build a "private cloud" filled with technologies like big data.… "You're already a walking sensor platform," Hunt said, referring to all of the information captured...

WASHINGTON – Dead people don’t need cell phones. That’s the message Rep. Tim Griffin of Arkansas wants to send Congress, after he says a controversial government-backed program that helps provide phones to low-income Americans ended up sending mobiles to the dead relatives of his constituents. Griffin has introduced a bill that targets the phone hand-out program, which has ballooned into a fiscal headache for the government. “This program demands reform,” Griffin told FoxNews.com on Monday. “There is a lot of waste in it and we need to be asking ourselves, ‘Where do we draw the line? Do we give everybody...

This is the Offical White House Response to the Cell Phone unlocking petition Official White House Response to Make Unlocking Cell Phones Legal. It's Time to Legalize Cell Phone Unlocking By R. David Edelman Thank you for sharing your views on cell phone unlocking with us through your petition on our We the People platform. Last week the White House brought together experts from across government who work on telecommunications, technology, and copyright policy, and we're pleased to offer our response. The White House agrees with the 114,000+ of you who believe that consumers should be able to unlock their...

SNIPPET: "A seventh man, aged 20, was arrested on Thursday and continues to be questioned." SNIPPET: "Irfan Nasser, 30, from Sparkhill, and Irfan Khalid, 26, from Sparkbrook, are accused of travelling to Pakistan for terrorism training, including bomb making, and weapons and poison making; as well making a martyrdom video and planning a bombing campaign. Ashik Ali, 26, from Balsall Heath, and Rahi Ahmed, 25, from Moseley, face charges related to planning a bombing campaign in the UK, including constructing a home-made explosive device for terrorist acts and stating an intention to be suicide bombers. Two other suspects - Bahader...

... FastCompany reports that cellphones are giving farmers in African countries remote access to critical banking services that were previously unavailable to them. The ability to pay their bills, move money and make insurance adjustments empowers these farmers with a new ability to keep their finances stabilized— despite being miles from any financial institution. But the phones are accomplishing more than administrative duties. According to CNN, they’re also allowing rural residents to easily broker deals, and share weather information and market prices with each other. With a simple text, a farmer can find out the prices of specific crops in...

As of Saturday, your options for owning an unlocked phone become far more limited. You can ask your carrier to unlock it—and good luck with that—or you can pay a premium to manufacturers like Apple or Google for a new unlocked phone. You just can’t unlock your phone yourself—at least, not legally. That decision was made not by voters, the courts, or even Congress. It was made by one man, 83-year-old Congressional Librarian James Hadley Billington, who is responsible for interpreting the meaning of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Billington decided last October that unlocking your phone yourself is...

A new law that makes it illegal to 'unlock' your cell phone and switch carriers goes into effect today and will carry fines between $2,500 and $500,000, and in some cases, prison time. The change made by the U.S. Copyright Office and Library of Congress to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act will make it illegal for consumers to unlock mobile devices without the permission of their carrier. The lock feature on mobile devices essentially allows carriers a way to prevent customers from switching to a new plan with a different company. Unless your phone came unlocked and are grandfathered in...

Vladimir Lenin is not considered funny in Poland. A Polish mobile phone operator that used a cartoon image of the Russian communist revolutionary found itself barraged by angry feedback and responded this week by stopping its advertising campaign. Older Poles remember the late Soviet leader for shaping a communist regime that killed millions and imposed mass terror in the Soviet Union. A communist regime was later imposed on Poles against their will by the Soviets after World War II. The company, Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa S.A., counted on younger Poles having shaken such associations, and recently started using a drawing of...

Big Brother has been outsourced. The police can find out where you are, where you’ve been, even where you’re going. All thanks to that handy little human tracking device in your pocket: your cellphone.  There are 331 million cellphone subscriptions—about 20 million more than there are residents—in the United States. Nearly 90 percent of adult Americans carry at least one phone. The phones communicate via a nationwide network of nearly 300,000 cell towers and 600,000 micro sites, which perform the same function as towers. When they are turned on, they ping these nodes once every seven seconds or so, registering...

Africa boasts more cellphone users than all of North America The silver lining of being a developing continent is that you can skip entire stages of technological progress, like going directly from no phones to cellphones without suffering through land lines in between. Africa, for example, now has more mobile subscribers than the United States or Europe, and that means big things for African economies. Like we've mentioned before, beyond its wild growth, the African cellular telecommunications market is a hotbed of innovation. Areas like telemedicine and cellphone-based money-transfer schemes don't just make life easier, they help people live healthier...

PALM CITY — Because the contract with its biggest client expired, call center iVox Solutions LLC is laying off about 120 employees on Friday. The workers have known about it for several weeks, iVox Chief Operating Officer Chris Stapleton said. Still, "it'll be a tough day because we really care about our employees," he said. Stapleton said at least some of the layoffs should be short-lived. The company, founded in 2003 as Old Cell Phone Corp., a vendor of used cellphones, will begin training Monday of 20 employees, who were not laid off, for an outbound call project for a...

Is there a difference between using a "hotspot" and having your phone become a hotspot? Is there a difference between phones/carriers or just carriers. I had an AT&T HTC phone, my friend had an AT&T I-Phone and got coverage where I could not. I need to have an internet connection for may laptop at an upcoming event and am considering getting a hotspot. Please offer info/suggestions/etc. (Serious please) yeah right!

The richest man in the world, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, is making millions in profits from a government program that supplies poor Americans with free cell phones. Mr Slim, who is worth an estimated $69billion, owns the parent company of both the service provider and phone producer which creates the phones used in the Lifeline program. The government program was originally enacted under President Reagan's administration in an effort for poor Americans without access to phones to have a way to contact prospective employers, arrange for healthcare, and be in touch with their children's schools. Republicans have since attacked...

In 1978, my college tuition was about $1,200 per year. In 1985 my first cell phone also cost me $1,200, and its sole function was that it could make phone calls -- at about a buck per minute. (Motorola's first cell phone hit the market at $3,995!) But something interesting happened to both products on the way to the year 2012... Today, my daughter (and her parents) are staring down college tuitions in the range of $22,000 to $40,000 per year to prepare for her declared career interest. My new iPhone has moved in exactly the opposite direction -- purchased...

As a recovering pollster (I worked for Democratic pollster Peter Hart from 1974 to 1981), let me weigh in on the controversy over whether the polls are accurate. Many conservatives are claiming that multiple polls have overly Democratic samples, and some charge that media pollsters are trying to discourage Republican voters. First, some points about the limits of polls. Random sample polling is an imprecise instrument. There's an error margin of 3 or 4 percent, and polling theory tells us that one out of 20 polls is wrong, with results outside the margin of error. Sometimes it's easy to spot...

The Kodiak Daily Mirror reports she slipped as she was texting on her phone at the same time she tried to toss a cigarette butt over the cliff edge. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/09/27/alaska-woman-falls-off-60-foot-cliff-while-texting/?test=latestnews#ixzz27lhu2uif