Slow Recovery Worsens Financial State of Medicare

The estimates, in the annual report by the Medicare trustees, were immediately swept up into the already inflamed political battle over federal spending, debt and the future of entitlement programs.

The trustees said that payroll tax revenues, which provide most of the money for Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund, were lower than expected last year because earnings were “considerably lower than projected” and the economy was weaker than expected.

Republicans said the bleaker picture for Medicare showed a need for immediate action to shore up the finances of the program, which insures 47.5 million people who are 65 and older or disabled.

“The biggest threat Medicare faces right now is the status quo,” said the House speaker, John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio. “The trustees’ report makes it clear that if we do nothing, Medicare will not be able to pay promised benefits to American seniors.”

Democrats said that the financial outlook for Medicare would have been much worse without the new health care law. The law, which President Obama cites as one of his greatest political accomplishments, promises to be a central point of conflict in the 2012 presidential election.

Without the new law, said Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, “Medicare would have gone bankrupt in 2016, only five years from now.”

Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said, “The current economic crisis has hit the Medicare trust fund, and hit it hard.” Mr. Baucus, an architect of the new law, and other Democrats vowed to resist Republican efforts to repeal it.

The trustees said the financial outlook for Social Security had changed little. They said the Social Security trust fund would be exhausted in 2036, one year sooner than projected in last year’s report, and even then, they said, tax revenue would be sufficient to pay three-fourths of promised benefits through 2085.

It is inconceivable that politicians would allow either program to run out of money. The projected dates of insolvency are widely used as a measure of the financial condition of Social Security and Medicare, which together account for more than one-third of all federal spending.

In unveiling the new estimates, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, the managing trustee of the trust funds, noted the need for additional borrowing to keep the government’s myriad commitments in other programs.

“On Monday,” Mr. Geithner said, “just three days from today, the United States will reach the debt limit set by Congress. Because Congress has not yet acted, we have now set in motion a series of extraordinary measures that will give Congress some additional time to raise the debt limit.”

As a condition of increasing the debt limit, many Republicans are demanding changes in benefit programs. But House Republicans have discovered that they are playing with political dynamite when they propose major changes in Medicare.

The reports were signed by the six trustees: three cabinet officers, the Social Security commissioner and two public representatives.

The Medicare report included a disclaimer by the chief Medicare actuary, Richard S. Foster. “The financial projections shown in this report for Medicare do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations” in the short term or the long range, said Mr. Foster, a civil servant whose independence is protected by law.

The projections assume that Medicare will cut doctors’ fees by 29 percent on Jan. 1, as required under current law, but Congress routinely intercedes to block such cuts.

Moreover, the report says that projected Medicare costs over 75 years are about 25 percent lower because of the new health care law.

Under the law, Medicare will hold down payments to hospitals and other health care providers to reflect presumed increases in productivity. But, Mr. Foster said, if these constraints are kept in place, Medicare payments to providers will eventually be “far below the levels paid by private health insurance.”

 

Bahrain Says It Will End State of Emergency

JERUSALEM — The king of Bahrain said Sunday that the state of emergency he imposed in mid-March to quell antigovernment protests on that strategic and contested island will end June 1.

The announcement is a sign that Bahrain is seeking to assure banks and foreign governments that the chaos of recent months is over and that the kingdom, which depends heavily on financial business, is trying to return to normal.

It is also a sign that the numerous arrests and rushed trials of opposition figures in military courts could be running their course. Some leading opposition figures went on trial as the announcement was being made.

Bahrain is a majority Shiite Muslim country run by a Sunni royal family and elite. The government cracked down hard on the protests, which the organizers said were inspired by Egypt and Tunisia but which the government accused of being aided by Iran, which is predominantly Shiite.

The day before declaring the three-month state of emergency, the king brought in about 2,000 troops from Saudi Arabia and other neighboring countries.

Since then, hundreds of protesters and activists, including opposition leaders, have been arrested. Under the emergency statutes, they are tried in military courts and face harsh punishment through antiterrorism laws, including the death penalty. The protests have led to the deaths of at least 30 people. Among those due to be tried are journalists and medical personnel.

Some people reacted with joy to the impending end to the emergency statute.

“I am quite pleased,” Jasim Husain Ali, a legislator with the opposition Wefaq party, said by telephone. “This is what Bahrain needs now: to get on with business and with developing the political economy.”

But others saw the announcement as a ruse.

“This is a cosmetic step trying to show the international community that everything is back to normal when it is not,” Nabil Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, said in a telephone interview. “I don’t see it as a real initiative that will solve problems. Otherwise they would release political prisoners. The dispute is wider now than it was one month ago between the ruling elite and the people.”

The Bahrain Grand Prix, originally scheduled for March 13 and a source of a big government investment, was postponed because of the unrest.

Formula One’s governing body said last week that Bahrain had until June 3 to decide if a new date could be set for this year. If Bahrain does plan to go ahead with the race, that would help explain the lifting of the state of emergency on June 1 rather than June 15 as originally planned, several Bahrainis said.

 

Chinese State Media, in a Show of Openness, Print Jet Photos

 

BEIJING — The J-15 Flying Shark is China’s newest attack jet, a sinuous fighter with the folding wings, shortened tail cone and bulked-up landing gear it needs to serve on China’s first aircraft carrier, which is expected to start sea trials soon. It is indisputable evidence of China’s growing mastery of military technology.

Also military technology of Russia and Ukraine, albeit not entirely with their consent.

Barely two weeks after splashing photographs of the aircraft carrier on the Internet, China’s state media on Monday published the first close-up pictures of the J-15. The day before, Web sites that focus on China’s military had run the same photograph, snapped outside the Shenyang plant in northeast China where the plane is being developed.

Like the aircraft carrier it will call home, the jet faces years of tests and refinement before it will formally enter service, military analysts say. The photographs nevertheless suggest that the People’s Liberation Army, long notoriously secretive, is lifting some veils.

“The recent spate of releases of photographs of airplanes under development is a sign of relaxed control of military information in China,” Lan Yun, an editor at the Beijing-based Modern Ships magazine, said in an interview. “It could be seen as a sign of more transparency of the Chinese military.”

Mr. Lan and Andrei Chang, the Hong Kong-based editor of Kanwa Asian Defense Review, said that the photograph indicated that the aircraft had passed factory tests and was now bound for flight testing.

Internet posts by analysts and Chinese aviation enthusiasts point to a fighter crammed with the best technology China can produce: holographic “heads-up” instrument displays, advanced anti-ship radar and, Mr. Lan said, self-guiding missiles, in contrast to the gravity-controlled bombs and sight-guided missiles that largely populate China’s existing 3,200-aircraft fleet.

When it is deployed — probably sometime after 2015 — the J-15 will signal the dawn of a new ability by China to assert authority along its coastline.

The carrier and its jet are said to employ the best Chinese technology, but both are also direct descendants of weaponry devised in the dying days of the old Soviet Union.

China’s new carrier, expected to be christened the Shi Lang, is a retrofitted version of a 1988 Soviet aircraft carrier that Chinese interests bought from Ukraine after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, supposedly for conversion into a floating casino in Macao. But the Macao gambling license never materialized, and as many had suspected, the ship wound up elsewhere — in Dalian, a city in northeastern China where workers began a decade-long retrofit.

The J-15 has followed an even more tortuous route.

At the century’s turn, many news reports say, the Chinese beseeched Moscow to sell them a Sukhoi-33, a 1980s Soviet fighter capable of landing on carriers. Moscow refused. But in 2001, the Chinese bought an Su-33 prototype from Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, and began a teardown to learn its secrets.

The Russians were incensed.

Yet the J-15 unofficially unveiled this week, which externally seems a clone of the Su-33, in fact has been remade inside with Chinese improvements. Mr. Lan said that advances in the plane’s outdated avionics and missile-guidance systems had made it a far more sophisticated version of the Russian jet.

The J-15 is being compared in some quarters to the American F-18, a workhorse on Navy carriers. But Mr. Lan said it had a shorter range, in large part because its takeoff method — flying off a ski-jump-style runway — dictated that it could carry less fuel than a comparable American jet, which is propelled off a flat carrier runway.

Flying a ski-jump is not duck soup. And in February, a Ukrainian court convicted a Russian man of conspiring to give the Chinese details of a Crimean air base that had been used to train Su-33 pilots to take off from a carrier’s ski-jump ramp.

In Huludao, a navy installation on China’s northeast coast, workers are said to have built a rough clone of the Crimea test center, complete with a ski ramp for ascending jets.

None of this is exceptional. Russian, Chinese and American espionage agents wage unacknowledged wars to steal the others’ technology.

But the Chinese, some experts say, are notably adept.

“They take what they can get, and improve what they can,” Abraham M. Denmark, an independent expert on China’s military in Washington, said in an interview. “It’s a strategy that permeates many of their innovations.”

 

State of the Art: A Camera That Honors Old Virtues

 

In the last few years, the definition of a camera has been pulled and twisted like taffy. Some are huge, heavy machines with lenses like telescopes. Others are candy-colored minis, as much fashion statements as recording devices. Some are specialized for use underwater or taking hundreds of shots a second. Some are phones.

And the new Fujifilm X100 is — different. Quirky, amazing, baffling, out-there different.

For starters, it’s been designed to look exactly like some Leica film camera from 30 years ago. The top portion and bottom plate have been “die-cast from magnesium alloy” (it’s silver metal, in other words); the grippy part is black and textured. The control dials are physical metal wheels, so you can check the settings even before you turn on the camera.

The retro look gets plenty of stares in public. The joke is that you know you are carrying the very latest, cutting-edge, $1,200 semiprofessional camera, but passers-by think you’re the last Luddite film buff in America.

That’s right, $1,200. Pro photographers have been drooling over the arrival of this thing for months; it’s no point-and-shoot, that’s for sure.

You’re expected to know something about photography if you use this camera; for example, there are no scene modes at all, like beach, twilight, portrait. Instead, there are dedicated shutter speed and exposure dials on top and a metal aperture control ring around the lens.

If you know how to use aperture and shutter speed controls, no camera on earth gives you quicker and more direct access. (Each of these controls also has an automatic setting.)

As a further reminder that this camera isn’t for the Wal-Mart masses, this camera also has — are you sitting down? — no zoom. That’s right; it has a fixed nonzooming lens.

A nonzooming lens has a bunch of advantages. It’s flat, so it makes this camera small enough to slip easily into a coat pocket or purse.

It never has to extend or retract, so the camera is ready to shoot instantly after you flip its clicky on/off switch. And it ensures that photos are razor-sharp across the entire frame, with little of the distortion that can result at the corners when you use zoom lenses.

But no zoom? Really? That seems awfully Cro-Magnon in an age when much cheaper pocket cams can zoom 18 times or 20 times.

Real photo devotees don’t see a fixed lens as a huge detriment. They see it as a limit that inspires compositional creativity, like the 140-character limit on Twitter. And on the X100, the lens is the equivalent of a 35-millimeter film lens, perfect for portraits and a nice balance for landscapes.

Other fixed-lens digital cameras, like the Sigma DP2, embrace the same design philosophy — eliminating zoom for the sake of compactness, speed and quality.

But one X100 feature in particular sets it far apart, and accounts for a big chunk of its price. It not only has an eyepiece viewfinder, but a switchable one. It can be either a pure glass viewfinder that you see right through, as on an S.L.R., or a tiny TV screen; you switch back and forth by flipping a lever by the lens.

When it’s in see-through mode, you get a bright, big, beautiful view of the world around you, complete with superimposed electronic information about your settings. When it’s in electronic mode, you see a preview of the actual photo you’re about to take, complete with exposure, depth-of-field and white-balance effects.

Each is useful in different situations, and it’s fantastic to be able to flip between them. A truly great feature, beautifully executed — a photographic first.

It’s also an f/2.0 lens, meaning that it lets in a lot of light; this camera does exceptionally well in low light, even without its built-in flash. It can also create absolutely gorgeous blurred background effects. The photos have a clarity, a depth, that you’d expect from a still more expensive S.L.R.

On a spring-break trip to a theme park, this camera produced some of the most memorable photos of my children I’ve ever taken.

It also ruined a lot more shots than any camera I’ve used.

 

California Is Owed Millions of Dollars by State Employees

LOS ANGELES — When the State of California began handing out i.o.u.’s in 2009 because of a cash shortage, taxpayers were predictably aghast. But few knew at the time that even as pay-you-later notes kept going out, state agencies were also doling out millions of dollars in interest-free loans in the form of salary and travel advances to employees without collecting repayment.

Now, with the state budget facing a devastating $26.5 billion deficit, Gov. Jerry Brown is demanding that agencies immediately stop the practice and determine how much money employees with unpaid loans owe the state.

The state controller began investigating the practice two years ago and has issued several audits about the practice. In 2009, for example, an audit found that 11 agencies had more than $13 million in outstanding loans. In many cases, the agencies had not collected on the loans at all.

“The situation reinforces the worst stereotype of ineffective and inefficient government,” Mr. Brown said in a statement with the executive order issued Wednesday. He said he was ordering all state agencies to “immediately investigate the backlog of uncollected debts and find every penny owed to taxpayers.”

The executive order comes as Mr. Brown is struggling to get his own budget approved by the Legislature. He has repeatedly said that he wants to go to the voters to have tax extensions approved, but so far has been unable to secure needed support from a handful of Republicans.

At the same time, Mr. Brown remains eager to show that he is aggressively cutting down on waste. So far this year, he has issued executive orders cutting the state’s vehicle fleet and state employee cellphones as well as banning the dispersal of promotional items like key chains.

Under state law, employees are able to receive hardship advances from their paychecks and for work travel from an agency’s discretionary fund. But many agencies had not been following state regulations by taking the money out of the employees’ paychecks. After three years, the money cannot be collected without an employee’s consent.

“The state’s poor debt collection and accounting practices are fleecing public coffers at a time when vital public programs are being decimated by unprecedented budget cuts,” the state controller, John Chiang, said in a statement Wednesday.

Administration officials expect that there are millions more dollars in unpaid loans that have not been accounted for. So far, the state does not know how much of the money is from salary advances that should have been repaid and how much is travel expenses that were not accounted for.

Other money owed to the state has also gone unpaid. For example, in an audit of the California Highway Patrol, state officials found that the agency had not collected money from people who were convicted of drunken driving and obligated to repay the state for the investigation.

Each of the audited agencies has now promised to stiffen its accounting procedures and turn over any delinquent accounts to the controller’s office so that the money can be collected and repaid to the state’s general fund.

 

State of the Art: A Camera That Honors Old Virtues

 

In the last few years, the definition of a camera has been pulled and twisted like taffy. Some are huge, heavy machines with lenses like telescopes. Others are candy-colored minis, as much fashion statements as recording devices. Some are specialized for use underwater or taking hundreds of shots a second. Some are phones.

And the new Fujifilm X100 is — different. Quirky, amazing, baffling, out-there different.

For starters, it’s been designed to look exactly like some Leica film camera from 30 years ago. The top portion and bottom plate have been “die-cast from magnesium alloy” (it’s silver metal, in other words); the grippy part is black and textured. The control dials are physical metal wheels, so you can check the settings even before you turn on the camera.

The retro look gets plenty of stares in public. The joke is that you know you are carrying the very latest, cutting-edge, $1,200 semiprofessional camera, but passers-by think you’re the last Luddite film buff in America.

That’s right, $1,200. Pro photographers have been drooling over the arrival of this thing for months; it’s no point-and-shoot, that’s for sure.

You’re expected to know something about photography if you use this camera; for example, there are no scene modes at all, like beach, twilight, portrait. Instead, there are dedicated shutter speed and exposure dials on top and a metal aperture control ring around the lens.

If you know how to use aperture and shutter speed controls, no camera on earth gives you quicker and more direct access. (Each of these controls also has an automatic setting.)

As a further reminder that this camera isn’t for the Wal-Mart masses, this camera also has — are you sitting down? — no zoom. That’s right; it has a fixed nonzooming lens.

A nonzooming lens has a bunch of advantages. It’s flat, so it makes this camera small enough to slip easily into a coat pocket or purse.

It never has to extend or retract, so the camera is ready to shoot instantly after you flip its clicky on/off switch. And it ensures that photos are razor-sharp across the entire frame, with little of the distortion that can result at the corners when you use zoom lenses.

But no zoom? Really? That seems awfully Cro-Magnon in an age when much cheaper pocket cams can zoom 18 times or 20 times.

Real photo devotees don’t see a fixed lens as a huge detriment. They see it as a limit that inspires compositional creativity, like the 140-character limit on Twitter. And on the X100, the lens is the equivalent of a 35-millimeter film lens, perfect for portraits and a nice balance for landscapes.

Other fixed-lens digital cameras, like the Sigma DP2, embrace the same design philosophy — eliminating zoom for the sake of compactness, speed and quality.

But one X100 feature in particular sets it far apart, and accounts for a big chunk of its price. It not only has an eyepiece viewfinder, but a switchable one. It can be either a pure glass viewfinder that you see right through, as on an S.L.R., or a tiny TV screen; you switch back and forth by flipping a lever by the lens.

When it’s in see-through mode, you get a bright, big, beautiful view of the world around you, complete with superimposed electronic information about your settings. When it’s in electronic mode, you see a preview of the actual photo you’re about to take, complete with exposure, depth-of-field and white-balance effects.

Each is useful in different situations, and it’s fantastic to be able to flip between them. A truly great feature, beautifully executed — a photographic first.

It’s also an f/2.0 lens, meaning that it lets in a lot of light; this camera does exceptionally well in low light, even without its built-in flash. It can also create absolutely gorgeous blurred background effects. The photos have a clarity, a depth, that you’d expect from a still more expensive S.L.R.

On a spring-break trip to a theme park, this camera produced some of the most memorable photos of my children I’ve ever taken.

It also ruined a lot more shots than any camera I’ve used.

 

U.S. Orders Airlines to State Fees More Clearly

Although the rules do not set limits on how much carriers can charge for items like bags, ticket changes and seats, they do require airlines to more clearly disclose these and other fees in advertisements and on their Web sites. Ads will have to cite the full price, including government taxes that now are often relegated to the fine print.

Other provisions increase the compensation carriers must pay passengers who are involuntarily bumped from flights (from up to $800 to as much as $1,300 for the longest delays). They also require the airlines to refund checked baggage fees if luggage is lost, and require airlines to promptly notify customers of delays over 30 minutes. The provisions impose a four-hour limit on time spent on the tarmac for delayed international flights, expanding a policy that has been in place for domestic flights for a year.

The Department of Transportation proposed these and other passenger protections last June, soliciting public comment on the ideas, and ultimately adopted most of the rules under consideration, despite objections raised by the airlines.

“Airline passengers have a right to be treated fairly,” Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary, said in a statement Tuesday. “It’s just common sense that if an airline loses your bag or you get bumped from a flight because it was oversold, you should be reimbursed. The additional passenger protections we’re announcing today will help make sure air travelers are treated with the respect they deserve.”

The government is trying to deal with a growing frustration for travelers: confusing ticket prices and hidden fees.

When the new rules take effect in late August, airlines will have to prominently disclose all potential fees on their Web sites, including surcharges for baggage, meals, canceling or changing reservations and seat assignments. Although the overview of the new rules provided by the Transportation Department did not specify how these fees would have to be displayed during online fare searches or purchases, the government did single out baggage fees — which have become increasingly complicated — for special attention.

The new rules require the airlines and ticket agents to refer passengers to up-to-date information about baggage charges, both before and after a ticket purchase. Airlines must also include bag fees in e-ticket confirmations sent to passengers.

Another new rule that is sure to spur debate requires airlines and ticket agents to include all government taxes and fees in every advertised price. That would change the longstanding practice of allowing advertisements to list government taxes and fees separately — usually as part of a lengthy, small-print disclaimer.

The Transportation Department also noted that it planned to issue a proposal later this year that would require extra fees to be displayed at all points of sale, not just on airline Web sites. That is another hot issue, as travel agencies have been asking the government to force airlines to share fee data with databases that make it easier for customers to compare ticket prices.

Since the Transportation Department released a preview of the new rules on the condition that the details not be shared until Wednesday, the airlines’ reaction to the policies could only be gleaned from responses they and their trade associations filed during the public comment period last year.

The Air Transport Association, the airlines’ trade group, objected, for instance, to the full-fare advertising requirement, calling the proposal “likely illegal” and pointing out that other businesses like hotels or telecommunications companies were not forced to include government taxes in their advertised prices.

“Given the wide and varied practice of unbundling services and advertising such services, it is not clear why the aviation industry should be treated differently,” the Air Transport Association wrote.

More pithily, Spirit Airlines said in its filing that forcing carriers to advertise prices including additional fees “would be akin to McDonald’s being required to only advertise burgers including the price of fries and a Coke.”

The Air Transport Association also objected to a rule, which was ultimately adopted, that will require airlines to hold a reservation at the quoted fare without payment, or offer cancellations without penalty, for at least 24 hours after a reservation is made.

Spirit Airlines wrote that this proposal would be “like allowing a customer at a grocery store to take home a carton of milk without charge, leave it out in the sun and then bring back the spoiled milk the next day.”

In a concession to the airlines’ objections, the government did limit the 24-hour rule to reservations made one week or more previous to a flight’s departure date. The Transportation Department also decided not to force airlines to incorporate their customer service plans into their contracts of carriage, which would have given passengers grounds for legal action if carriers violated their service commitments. The department also did not require baggage fee refunds when luggage is merely delayed.

Although the Air Transport Association opposed extending tarmac delay limits to international flights, the government adopted this rule, which will apply to domestic and foreign carriers. The Transportation Department cited the extended tarmac delays passengers experienced on foreign carriers during a snowstorm last December at Kennedy International Airport in New York as an “important factor” in its decision.

The airlines have warned that this rule will probably increase flight cancellations. That issue is currently in dispute as analysts, airline representatives and government officials debate whether the threat of hefty penalties for tarmac delays for domestic flights has resulted in more cancellations in the last year.

 

Israeli Luminaries Press For a Palestinian State

JERUSALEM — Dozens of Israel’s most honored intellectuals and artists have signed a declaration endorsing a Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders and asserting that an end to Israel’s occupation “will liberate the two peoples and open the way to a lasting peace.”

The signers plan to announce their position on Wednesday from the same spot in Tel Aviv where the Jewish state declared its independence in the spring of 1948. The page-long declaration is expected to be read there by Hanna Maron, one of the country’s best-known actresses and a winner of the Israel Prize, the country’s most prestigious award, which is granted yearly on Independence Day.

Of the more than 60 who had signed the declaration by Tuesday, about 20 were winners of the Israel Prize and a number of others had been awarded the Emet Prize, given by the prime minister for excellence in science, art and culture. Signatures were still being collected on Tuesday.

“The land of Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish people where its identity was shaped,” the statement begins. “The land of Palestine is the birthplace of the Palestinian people where its identity was formed.” It goes on to say that now is the time to live up to the commitment expressed by Israel’s founders in their Declaration of Independence to “extend our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness.”

Yaron Ezrahi, a political theorist at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem and one of the signers, said the group chose this week to issue its declaration because it was Passover, which marks the freedom of the Jewish people from slavery.

“We don’t want to pass over the Palestinian people,” Mr. Ezrahi said. “This is a holiday of freedom and independence.” He added that given the struggle for freedom across the Arab world today and the Palestinians’ plans to seek international recognition of their statehood by September, it was important for Israeli voices to be added to the call.

Two weeks ago, another group of several dozen prominent Israelis, many of them from the fields of security and business, issued what they called the Israeli Peace Initiative, a more detailed but somewhat similar plan for a two-state solution. Both groups say they are upset by their government’s policies in this regard, which they consider insufficient.

The Palestinian leadership says that unless Israel ends the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, it will not return to negotiations with it and will instead seek international recognition of Palestinian statehood by September at the United Nations.

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the real problem is that the Palestinians refuse to acknowledge that Israel is a Jewish state. Official recognition of that, it says, would revive negotiations, although there are also clear differences over land and Israel’s security needs.

Mr. Netanyahu is expected to announce by the end of May his proposal for moving forward with talks on a two-state solution.

 

ChevronWP7 updater pulled, places phones into 'non-serviceable state' of mind

 By Tim Stevens posted Apr 8th 2011 2:55PM We've had our phones in a number of states (Vermont is particularly lovely), but stopping by a "non-serviceable state" isn't exactly high on our list. Sadly, every user of ChevronWP7.updater may have unwittingly paid a visit to this place, that tool being pulled offline after Microsoft contacted its developer. It seems that anyone who used it to update their WP7 handsets to NoDo may now be in a bit of a bind. According to Microsoft those phones may not be able to receive any future updates -- ever. MS did warn people against using this updater in the first place, but we're still hopeful that Big Redmond will find a fix. If not, well, hope you like that copy & paste.

View the original article here