Month: July 2018

Enlarge / Pfizer's little, blue Viagra tablets get big price tag that have people seeing red. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Despite public and political pressure, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer keeps raising the prices of its drugs—standing apart from some of its rivals who have vowed to rein in periodic price hiking.

Around 100 of Pfizer’s drugs got higher list prices this week, the Financial Times first reported. The affected drugs include big sellers, such as Lyrica pain capsules, Chantix smoking-cessation medication, Norvasc blood-pressure pills, and the lung-cancer treatment Xalkori.

The price hikes mark a second round of increases for Pfizer this year. While many of the price changes in the individual rounds hover at or under 10 percent—many at 9.4 percent—the hikes collectively boost many drugs’ prices by double-digit percentages for the year overall. For instance, Chantix’s price jumped nearly 17 percent this year; Pfizer gave it a 9.4 percent increase in January and another seven percent boost July 1, bringing the list price of a 56-tablet bottle to $429, the Wall Street Journal noted. Likewise, Pfizer’s erectile dysfunction drug Viagra saw a 9.4 percent increase July 1 after a similar hike in January. Those hikes bring the list price of a month’s supply to $2,211.

Enlarge / Google's logo for the Android P Developer Preview. (credit: Google)

The latest Android P Preview (Preview #4, Beta #3) is out. It's a few days late given that it was supposed to launch in June, but now the Google Pixel 1 and Pixel 2 are free to update to the latest build. This "June" release has been bumped up to the July security patch, and it includes "the latest bug fixes and optimizations for stability and polish" according to Google blog post.

Flash Beta 3 to a device and you'll find a few changes, mostly related to gesture navigation. Keep in mind it's still a beta, and while I'm going to point out that things are incomplete, things are allowed to be incomplete. Again, it's a beta.

Gesture Nav changes

Enlarge / Anthony Levandowski, then VP of engineering at Uber, speaking to reporters at the Uber Advanced Technologies Center on September 13, 2016 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (credit: ANGELO MERENDINO/AFP/Getty Images)

Anthony Levandowski, one of the most controversial figures in the self-driving car business, is connected to a new driverless truck startup, TechCrunch has reported. Called Kache.ai, the company is still in stealth mode, so little is known about its technology or business model.

What we do know is that Kache's incorporation documents list an address in St. Helena, California that—according to TechCrunch—is owned by Levandowski's father and stepmother. “Kǎchē” is "truck" in Chinese.

We also know a lot about Levandowski. He was involved in the DARPA Grand Challenge competitions more than a decade ago. Later, he was a key figure in Google's self-driving car program before he left to start the self-driving truck startup Otto in 2016. Within months of its founding, Otto was acquired by Uber, and Levandowski was put in charge of Uber's driverless car program.

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

Amazon's Prime Day promotions are often a good indicator of which way the company's many-headed borg is facing, and this year, one Amazon entity is screaming quite loudly: Twitch.

Ars' Jeff Dunn has already summed up a bunch of discounts and offers to expect this coming Prime Day, but in Twitch's case, we're looking at a Prime Fortnight. Starting today, Twitch members with their Amazon Prime credentials attached can claim a little over two weeks of "free" video games, each title arriving one day after the next. What's more, the 19-game selection is quite solid.

(All of this is not to be confused with Prime Fortnite, of course, but there's one of those as well. Until July 10, "Twitch Prime" users can claim free cosmetics in Epic's mega-successful shooting-and-building game.)

(credit: Opening image based on Eve Online assets courtesy CCP Games.)

Long before loot boxes became the bane of the Internet's existence, in-game purchases at large could cause a bit of commotion within certain gaming communities. Roughly seven years ago, for instance, a simple monocle almost brought down one of the most active gaming communities around: EVE Online. With a staff holiday looming tomorrow on July 4, we're resurfacing this cautionary tale of computer-gaming consumerism. It originally ran on July 11, 2011 and appears unchanged below.

Controversy was expected, but not virtual riots.

On June 21, developer CCP updated its popular space-opera-slash-MMO EVE Online so that players could take their avatars outside their ships and walk around the game world. With this new ability came a store that sold vanity items—in-game clothing and accessories that alter an avatar's looks but don't change an avatar's abilities. The price for these items was much higher than most people expected for vanity in-game items which did absolutely nothing, and it made players nervous. The EVE playerbase didn't want their game turning to microtransactions to increase the cost of playing.