Amazon’s new high-end Kindle lacks FCC approval for sale

Published September 8, 2012 | By Iowadawg

Yes, I will buy one when they come out…have my eyes though on this one:

Amazon.com Inc trumpeted cutting-edge wireless technology as a key selling point for the fanciest of the new Kindle devices introduced by CEO Jeff Bezos on Thursday. There’s just one problem: the devices have not yet been approved for sale by the Federal Communications Commission.

FCC approval is required for wireless communications products, to assure that they operate safely and won’t improperly interfere with other signals.

A pre-order confirmation email sent by Amazon late on Thursday, September 6, for the $499 Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch 4G tablet included the following note: “We will send you an email asking you to confirm your pre-order of Kindle Fire when it is approved for sale by the Federal Communications Commission.”

Amazon is accepting pre-orders now and plans to ship the 4G devices on November 20. A company spokeswoman said Amazon expects to receive FCC approval before November 20.

Attorneys and analysts familiar with FCC compliance procedures agreed that the FCC is unlikely to reject the Amazon devices out of hand, or prolong the approval process past its ship date.

But they say it’s very unusual for a company to announce major new products without first getting the sign-off from the agency.

“I can’t think of an instance where a device has been offered by a U.S. carrier or an independent retailer that has not had FCC approval yet,” said John Jackson, a wireless analyst at CCS Insight.

An FCC spokesman declined to comment.

The 4G Kindle Fire tablets are a crucial part of Amazon’s attempt to challenge Apple Inc’s iPad at the premium end of the booming tablet market.

The lack of FCC approval at this stage is likely a result of Amazon’s lack of experience with wireless hardware, according to Charles Golvin, a wireless analyst at Forrester Research.

GM Reportedly Abandoning Full-Size Hybrid Trucks and SUVs

The next generation of full-size GM pickups and SUVs will be almost entirely free of hybrid models, according to GM Inside News. Scheduled to launch less than a year from now, the new lineup was originally slated to utilize an updated version of the current two-mode system. Now, it appears the next-generation Cadillac Escalade may be the only full-size ute to be hybridized.

GM wouldn’t comment on its hybrid full-size picks and SUVs coming to an end, only saying that the real-world benefits and financial viability of their entire portfolio of global and regional vehicle programs are periodically reviewed. As a result, “some technologies are pulled ahead, delayed, or cancelled. This is a normal course of business.”

Other sources inside GM have told C/D that the program for the next-gen full-size truck and SUV lineup–including the Tahoe and Yukon SUVs and Silverado and Sierra pickup–is focusing on evolutionary development in chassis refinement, driving dynamics, interior appointments, and comfort, rather than hybridized powertrains.

The Empty Chair Accepts His Nomination

Barack Obama is no Barack Obama. When it has been shown there is nothing there — repeatedly and in a fashion that all but the most devoted minions refuse to see — it becomes difficult to ignore. This is not the same man who ran for President in 2008. He was an illusion then, but today, Americans have no illusions. “Hope and change” has become “what the hell happened?”

There has been much talk in the press about Clint Eastwood’s performance last week at the Republican National Convention, but the honest among them have to admit that the empty chair was a perfect metaphor for Barack Obama — because there really is not much there.

Politicians are renowned for their ability to talk and talk and talk — all without saying much. Yet, wasn’t this one supposed to be different? Wasn’t he by now, supposed to have amassed a record of accomplishment that would put mere mortals to shame? Weren’t we readying Mount Rushmore for the man?

In another era, someone might have asked. “Where’s the beef?” Nowadays, the only beef as far as Barack is concerned is the Wagyu steaks he has flown in for parties at the Whitehouse.

He can’t talk about accomplishments, because he has none. Sure, he passed the Stimulus and Obamacare and Dodd Frank, but it is hard to sell any of this as success when it is all hugely unpopular and terrible policy. To most Americans, it doesn’t compute.

###

I love donuts, do you love donuts?

###

Quite Revealing – Obama proclaims his bi-partisanship regularly, but in 2010 he didn’t have Speaker Boehner’s phone number….

This is just reflective of something any substantive political watcher already knows; but it is affirming to find supportive evidence nonetheless.

President Obama continually sells the story of his across the aisle outreach as an excuse for why his policies failed. He claims he tried too hard to work with the other side.

This is a regular talking point for the institutional leftists. However, the truth is divergent in the extreme, and Bob Woodward hits on it within his new book “The Price of Politics”.

In an example Woodward shares:

The failure of Obama to connect with Boehner was vaguely reminiscent of another phone call late in the evening of Election Day 2010, after it became clear that the Republicans would take control of the House, making Boehner Speaker of the House.

Nobody in the Obama orbit could even find the soon-to-be-speaker’s phone number, Woodward reports. A Democratic Party aide finally secured it through a friend so the president could offer congratulations.

Can you imagine how “full of himself” President Obama must have been with his majority holding of the White House, The House of Representatives and the Senate in 2009/2010?

So internally focused on his own party, and ignoring of any other perspective (evidenced in the Obamacare fiasco) the entire White House did not even have a phone number for the #1 Republican leader in congress.

###

The Obama Index: The Newest Index to Measure Our Despair

To give you an idea how bad the jobs report released on Friday is, consider this fact: The employment situation in the country is so bad that economists can’t accurately measure it with the existing tools they use to measure jobs. In other words, we have entered a period in our country not contemplated by economists. They simply don’t have the tools to measure what’s actually occurring in the jobs market.

Modern economists never imagined a scenario in which a country with as much wealth, power and innovation as United States could stretch out a jobs recession as long as the country has under Obama.

Economists please meet Barack Hussein Obama, record-setter. More debt, more spending, more regulation than ever before- and fewer jobs.

We have a record amount of money in the system doing a record amount of nothing right now. And still the government policy wonks keep thinking that by injecting more money into a system already over-burdened by its money supply we will eventually get different results.

Only Obama could preside over an economy with so much money that has produced so little return as our economy has since January 2009.

Never in the annals of human history have so many dollars done so little for so many.

Read it all HERE>

###

Ha, here is the truth of obama….

###

Hopeless

The presidency doesn’t change who you are, Michelle Obama told us Tuesday night, but reveals who you are. The words were especially apt applied to her husband, whose time in office has indeed revealed an unchanging academic liberalism. What did the president’s convention speech last night reveal about his campaign?

Hope depreciates. The convention speakers’ message is that the president’s wise policies brought the recession to an end, that jobs have been coming back, and that they will continue to do so. They have, however, been coming back sluggishly — a fact everyone knows but few in Charlotte acknowledged — and neither the president’s speech nor Bill Clinton’s much-admired one offered any reason but blind faith to think that the situation will improve.

Attacks are the essence. To fill the hole where new ideas should be, President Obama and Vice President Biden offer attacks on Romney and Ryan. Nearly all campaign attacks involve distortions and simplifications. The Obama campaign’s rest on them. President Obama said that Romney’s Medicare plan asks “seniors to pay thousands of dollars more” — a claim that even some liberals have admitted is rubbish. Of Social Security he said that Romney planned on “turning it over to Wall Street.” In reality, Romney has backed away from proposals for personal accounts, which would have turned over the money to the beneficiaries to invest as they wish if they wished.

Government needs no solution.In the world of the Democrats’ rhetoric, very much including that of the president last night, there is no crisis of the welfare state. The thought that welfare states designed under the circumstances of the past have run up against ineluctable limits never intrudes on the happy fantasy that we can carry on pretty much as before, and indeed have the government blithely take on new commitments.

[Noun] [Verb] bin Laden. The president clearly relished going after Romney over foreign policy, sometimes seriously and sometimes pettily. It’s a miscalculation. The president’s shabby treatment of our allies will not be overcome by one (true!) gaffe by Romney in London. Given Obama’s own history, the argument that he should be reelected because he is the sitting commander-in-chief — which is all that can be said of his crack about his opponents’ lack of foreign-policy experience — will not sway anyone. Americans are glad Obama directed the killing of Osama bin Laden, and in large part for this reason he has an edge on foreign policy. But Americans are not going to keep him in office for it, any more than the British electorate gave Churchill a reward for greater accomplishments.

Strawmen must be vanquished. Both Biden and Obama battled against Republicans who supposedly want to leave Americans “on their own” rather than recognize that we’re “all in this together.” Perhaps the low point of Obama’s attempt to develop this criticism came when he claimed that “we have been told by our opponents” that “if a company releases toxic pollution into the air your children breathe, well, that’s just the price of progress.” (Cue the fact-checkers.) Neither Romney nor Ryan has proposed to abolish the welfare state, or entitlements, or to cut Social Security benefits for the poor. They have argued for placing limits on federal commitments to make them sustainable and compatible with economic growth. Evidently the president is shy about engaging the argument at that level.

President Obama is a candidate who disdains his opponents, harbors an unjustified esteem for his own political talents and policy wisdom, and has no real sense of the challenges of the day. Romney owes it to the country to beat him, and it ought to be doable.

From National Review (do read this site every day!).

###

Buffalo Bill performer reburied at South Dakota reservation

The remains of a man who died young while touring the world with Buffalo Bill were hidden for more than a century in an unmarked grave some 1,700 miles from his South Dakota Indian reservation.

Now Albert Afraid of Hawk is returning home. He’ll be reburied Sunday in accordance with Lakota tradition, thanks largely to Bob Young, a curious and persistent Connecticut history buff.

Young uncovered records of the Oglala Sioux member’s death at a Connecticut hospital after a bout with food poisoning from eating bad corn. A few years ago, Young pieced the details together and reached out to Afraid of Hawk’s family members.

Afraid of Hawk began traveling with Buffalo Bill’s world-famous troupe known as the Congress of Rough Riders of the World two years before he died at age 20. He was among a rotating cast that helped educate and entertain thousands of spectators eager to hear firsthand accounts of life on the unruly terrain.

Bookmark It