Month: July 2017

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Amazon encourages product discovery in many ways, including all those customized product lists on the site's homepage that are based on your search history and wish lists. Now the company is taking a different approach with a new feature called Amazon Spark. Tucked into the "Programs and Features" section of the Amazon iOS app is the Spark social network, in which Prime members can post photos to an Instagram-like feed. Users can tag products available on Amazon so anyone browsing the photo feed can instantly find and buy those items.

The one catch to Spark is that you must be a Prime member to post images to the social network, but any Amazon user can browse the Spark feed. If you want to post to Spark, you first have to set up an account of sorts by choosing five or more things that interest you from a word cloud. These topics range from "books" to "strange finds" to "TV binge-watching" and your choices influence the types of photos you'll see once you start using Spark. Once you confirm a username (by default it's the name associated with your current Amazon account, but you can change it) the Spark feed populates with posts from other users.

Enlarge / President Donald Trump. (credit: Getty Images News | Pool)

The Trump administration supports the Federal Communications Commission effort to overturn net neutrality rules passed during the Obama years, a White House spokesperson said yesterday.

"The previous administration went about this the wrong way by imposing rules on ISPs through the FCC's Title II rulemaking power,"White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters yesterday. "We support the FCC chair's efforts to review and consider rolling back these rules and believe that the best way to get fair rules for everyone is for Congress to take action and create regulatory and economic certainty."

The net neutrality rules passed in 2015 are enforced with the FCC's Title II authority over common carriers; a previous version of the rules that did not rely upon Title II was thrown out in court. Under Chairman Ajit Pai's leadership, the Republican-controlled FCC took a preliminary vote to undo the Title II classification and the net neutrality rules in May.

Enlarge / SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launches the EchoStar 23 satellite in March, 2017. (credit: SpaceX)

The seas were calm in early December 2010 when a spacecraft fell out of the sky, deployed its parachutes, and splashed into the Pacific Ocean. No American spacecraft had returned this way to Earth in 35 years, not since the splashdown of the final Apollo mission. The Dragon bobbing in the blue water didn’t carry any astronauts, just a whimsical payload of Le Brouère cheese. But it had made history all the same, as no private company had ever launched a spacecraft into orbit and safely returned it to Earth.

Just two years earlier, Elon Musk’s SpaceX had been left for dead. Like so many other new space ventures that had come before, it had made big promises but delivered few payoffs. Bankruptcy would certainly have swallowed SpaceX had NASA not thrown Musk a $1.6 billion lifeline two days before Christmas in 2008—a contract for a dozen cargo delivery flights to the International Space Station.

For some critics, SpaceX seemed just another company standing in line for a government handout. NASA didn’t see it this way. In the months after the Dragon’s historic flight, NASA studied the cost of developing the Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX's booster with nine engines that had lifted the Dragon spacecraft into orbit. The analysis concluded that had NASA developed the rocket through its traditional means, it would have cost taxpayers about $4 billion.