Month: September 2016

Enlarge / Heather Bresch, chief executive officer of drugmaker Mylan Inc. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

On Tuesday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced that his office is investigating Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc, the maker of EpiPen, for potentially using anticompetitive terms in contracts it had with many school systems. Those terms allowed schools to receive Mylan’s EpiPens for free or at discounted prices—as long as they didn’t buy any competitors' products for a year.

The terms may have helped Mylan hike the price of the life-saving medical devices without facing stiff competition from similar epinephrine-injecting products, such as Adrenaclick. Since 2007, the year Mylan acquired EpiPen, the company has raised the price of the pens by more than 400 percent, pushing the list price above $600 (~£446) and drawing sharp public and political criticism.

“No child’s life should be put at risk because a parent, school, or healthcare provider cannot afford a simple, life-saving device because of a drug-maker’s anti-competitive practices,” Schneiderman said in a news release. “If Mylan engaged in anti-competitive business practices, or violated antitrust laws with the intent and effect of limiting lower cost competition, we will hold them accountable.”

Until now, space tourism has been largely a venture based in the United States. Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Blue Origin, and World View have all announced various plans to fly would-be astronauts into space—or to the edge of space—from American soil. But now a Chinese-based company, KuangChi Science, wants to get into the game by launching balloons from Hangzhou, in eastern China.

China Daily reports that KuangChi will invest about $1.5 billion (~£1.1 billion) into development of futuristic experiences, including a "deep space tour that offers the experience of flying up to 24 kilometers above the ground, which is just beyond the border of outer space." Technically, this might overstate the flight, as the generally accepted boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space is 100km, known as the Kármán line. Moreover "deep space" is generally considered by experts to lie beyond Earth orbit.

But pay no mind to the details. According to KuangChi's website, the balloon experience aboard the "Traveller" capsule will "bring you on a comfortable near-space trip you have never experienced!" The Traveller vehicle is based on the same "airtight cabin design" as the Shenzhou V capsule (China's first crewed mission, launched in 2003) to block cosmic rays. Moreover, the company says the design of the vehicle will ensure the comfort of passengers, "enabling them to feel like sitting in a limousine car."

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

When AT&T purchased DirecTV, merger conditions imposed by the Federal Communications Commission required the ISP to offer Internet service for either $5 or $10 a month to people with low incomes.

But AT&T has found a way around this requirement in areas where the company has failed to upgrade its network to anything remotely resembling modern Internet service. If you live in a place where AT&T's maximum download speeds are less than a paltry 3Mbps, you can't get the discount from the new "Access from AT&T" program.

The FCC merger condition appears to require discount Internet service only in areas where speeds of at least 3Mbps are available. In most places, AT&T must offer either 5Mbps or 10Mbps Internet service for $10 per month to poor people. But in areas "where AT&T has deployed broadband service at top speeds below 5Mbps," the FCC merger order says, "the Company shall offer wireline Broadband Internet Access Service at speeds of at least 3Mbps, where technically available, to qualifying households in the Company’s wireline footprint for no more than $5 per month."

Enlarge / Sony should finally confirm the widely known existence of the PS4 Slim tomorrow. (credit: NeoGAF)

After largely ignoring hardware news at June's E3, Sony is set to make news with the splashy, official introduction of two pieces of PlayStation hardware tomorrow. The first, a redesign being called the PS4 Slim, has already been leaked and dissected in many corners of the game press, dampening any surprise from tomorrow's expected announcement. The other, a hardware upgrade with the codename "PS4 Neo," has been confirmed to exist, but we're looking forward to confirmations of the rumours and reports surrounding the half-step.

In any case, we'll be on hand at New York's PlayStation Theater starting at 3pm Eastern/Noon Pacific/8pm UK on September 7, ready to keep you up to date with the announcements and some instant analysis as they happen. While you wait for the start, why not take a deeper dive into our expectations for the event, based on the best reporting and rumor-wrangling we've seen so far. When you're done, click the link below and get ready to follow along.

Enlarge / Last-minute design tweaks being made to a truck part at Toyota's factory in Texas. (credit: Toyota)

Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing has many aliases: Short-Cycle Manufacturing, Continuous-Flow Manufacturing, the Kanban System (Kanban itself being only an element of JIT manufacturing), and the Toyota Production System. That last one is in its fifties, codified and instituted at Toyota in the 1960s. The notion arrived on Western shores roughly 20 years later.

Today, manufacturers are leapfrogging the just-in-time concept and blurring lines in the digital space in which body parts, mechanical systems, and designs live before they hit the reality of metal, plastic, and glass.

At Toyota's Texas truck plant, which builds Tacomas and Tundras, the lead engineer responsible for those products works right on the factory floor, overseeing actual production and end-of-line quality. This truck plant lives in arguably the most agile manufacturing ecosystem in the US, with the vast majority of suppliers inside the factory, building parts on an "immediately in time" basis.

Enlarge / A new Apple Watch may be among the announcements we see at the event. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It's September again, and you know what that means: another big Apple keynote with plenty of product announcements, a bunch of short product videos, and hopefully at least one sighting of Craig Federighi's hair. The fun at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco begins at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern/6pm UK on September 7th, and we'll be in the room where it happens to provide our usual stream of live news and commentary.

If you want to know what to expect, we've covered the most current and reliable rumors in depth. The short version is that we'll probably get a pair of new, possibly headphone jack-free iPhones, an updated Apple Watch with GPS, and a whole bunch of software update announcements.

For full details on the new stuff, plus any other details or announcements that Apple happens to make, follow along with our liveblog below.