Andrew and Webb wax prolific on what you should do about college, life and basketball. And Apple watches. And MacBooks. And USB.

• Happy extra Pi Day, 3-14-15
• What did you do? (Games, books, movies, etc.)
  • Andrew
    • Paramore
    • Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
    • The Kitchen (Cooking variety show on Food Network)
      • I like this a lot more than I thought I did
    • I’m about to start Great North Road by Peter F Hamilton, which looks long and epic, and I’m pretty excited about it.
    • Sid Meier’s Starships
  • Webb
    • Finishing up Darth Bane
    • Ultimate General:Gettysburg
    • Sports - mainly NBA and some college
    • Started reading 41 - book W wrote about H.W.
• Programming Note
  • No shows next week as Andrew is out of the country. Enjoy your week off and get ready to come back next week and hit it hard
• Two Big Stories (we each pick our biggest story of the week and talk about it)
  • Andrew -The big story long term story in the NBA is the decision not to smooth the cap when it goes up next year
    • From ESPN.com
      • "NBA teams are projecting the salary cap to jump to between $88 million and $92 million
      • The cap is set at $63 million and next season it is projected to land at about $66 million.
      • The largest salary-cap jump in history is $7 million in one season. What happens in 2016 could triple that leap."
    • Jonathan - Not really attached to a news story but kind of
      • Pres. Obama announced some relief for student loans
        • Don't go with the status quo
        • Is college necessary?
          • If I could do it again, I'd take college equivalents in high school and then community college
          • Not saying college education is worthless. But, is it the end all be all it used to be?
• The News
  • MLB
    • Yu Darvish is going to have Tommy John surgery, so he’s out for the season for the Rangers
    • A new protective pitching cap has been approved by the MLB
      • One was available last year, but only one pitcher wore the cap
        • Alex Torres of the Padres wearing last years protective pitching cap
        • The new one is actually padding that the pitcher would put on over his regular hat
    • NCAA Basketball
      • The American Gaming Association estimates that 40 million people will fill out 70 million brackets this year and around 9 billion dollars will be bet on games throughout March Madness
      • Duke and UVA both got bounced from the ACC Tourney
    • The Apple Announcement
      • HBO Now announced(TechHive)
        • We called it a couple shows ago. Nailed it
        • 15 bucks a month for all their current and past programing. They said “future programming” in the announcement, but I don’t know how you’re going to be able to watch future programming
      • Apple TV price drop to $69
        • This really just brings it in line with other products in the category
      • Research Kit
        • For medical research
        • A set of tools for apps for medical research
        • Apple has a good video on what kind of thing this framework can accomplish on their site
        • Research Kit will be open source, so it won’t be limited to Apple
        • Apparently Tim Cook was asked by an investor what the business model for Research Kit was. Tim answered that there wasn’t one
      • Macbook
        • We’ll talk about this a little bit later
      • Watch
        • The biggest two things we found out were pricing and that you can make and receive calls on the watch
          • So basically it’s a Dick Tracy kind of deal
    • NBA
      • With Westbrook playing so well, will Durant getting traded?
        • This was something I heard on the radio last week
          • Sam Presti said this was ridiculous(HoopsHype), but I’m not totally sure
          • You’d have thought the same could be said of James Harden and they didn’t even get a good deal when they traded him
          • Sam Presti hates the idea of losing a player for “nothing”(a concept I have a problem with, by the way) and Durant has yet to commit to the Thunder
          • There’s a little time for this to all shake out
        • Is Russ the successor to Kobe?
        • • Another interesting thing I heard on the radio
        • Kyrie is kind of good
        • • Spurs v. Cavs was nuts
        • Phil Jackson says the first pick in the draft is ok, but they’re really interested in building through free agency(HoopsHype)
        • • Big shocker
    • SlingTV hits 100,000(recode)
    • • "One executive familiar with the service described early results as “encouraging.”"
      • This is the number of new subscribers but it doesn’t tell us how many have cancelled or stuck around after the first week
    • Two new $1000+ laptops this week(IBTImes)
      • USB-C is the big deal with both of these machines, so lets talk about what that is first(PC Mag)
        • USB-C describes the jack. The cord runs on the USB 3.1 protocol which is compatible with USB 2.0 and 3.0
          • This type of connector can transmit power, data, video and has a maximum throughput that’s double that of USB 3.0. So it’s real fast
          • They could also mean external batteries for laptops equipped with this type of connector(Engadget)
          • Most importantly, it’s reversible, which means you can just plug it in and not worry about which direction its facing
        • Both machines have a high resolution display and rather insane batter life (9 hours for the Macbook and 12 for the Pixel)
      • The Chromebook Pixel 2(Google Store)
        • This runs Google’s Chrome OS
        • It has two USB-C ports, a headphone jack, an SD card reader, two USB 3 ports, a touchscreen and Googles ubiquitous voice control
      • The new Macbook(Apple)
        • Runs OS X, has a USB-C port and a headphone jack
• Check out Delayed Geekification: The Fifth Element on iTunes
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• Again, no show next week, we’ll see you all in a couple