Penny Dreadful

Verizon Wireless loves to nickel and dime its customers and the upcoming Motorola Droid presents new opportunities.

Droid supports Microsoft Exchange’s ActiveSync feature that lets users access email, calendar and contacts from their corporate servers running Exchange. But they could end up paying extra for the privilege, says InfoWorld.

Droid users will have to pay at least an additional $15 to $20 a month on top of their data plan for Exchange access. That means $45 to $50 a month including Exchange support instead of $30 a month for a data only plan. Droid will be exclusively available on the Verizon network for $200 and with a two-year contract.

“Most customers will pay $30 for the data plan that gets them internet access and push email,” Brenda Raney, a spokesperson for Verizon Wireless told Wired.com in an e-mail.  “Customers who use an enterprise server are in general business customers and an IT department is facilitating the access are the ones who need the $50 plan.”

Verizon says the additional fees are justified because the Droid is a primarily targeted at consumers. The fee also applies to all smartphones, including the BlackBerry, that want to access corporate email, the company has said reportedly.

But that may not be telling the whole story. In the case of the BlackBerry, users pay additional fees because the phones connect with a company’s BlackBerry Enterprise Systems and not the consumer-focused BlackBerry Internet System, points out Mashable. And that involves additional licensing fees.

The Droid, though, runs the open source and free Android 2.0 platform with ActiveSync support already built in. That means users shouldn’t have to pay extra fees for their device to connect with their corporate servers.

It also defeats some of the good intentions behind Android. Wasn’t Android expected to help bring in cost savings for carriers and consumers?

By Glenn Garvin

Imagine this. At a time of political turmoil, a charismatic, telegenic new leader arrives virtually out of nowhere. He offers a message of hope and reconciliation based on compromise and promises to marshal technology for a better future that will include universal health care.

The news media swoons in admiration — one simpering anchorman even shouts at a reporter who asks a tough question: “Why don’t you show some respect?!” The public is likewise smitten, except for a few nut cases who circulate batty rumors on the Internet about the leader’s origins and intentions. The leader, undismayed, offers assurances that are soothing, if also just a tiny bit condescending: “Embracing change is never easy.”

So, does that sound like anyone you know? Oh, wait — did I mention the leader is secretly a totalitarian space lizard who’s come here to eat us?

Welcome to ABC’s “V,” the most fascinating and bound to be the most controversial new show of the fall television season. Nominally a rousing sci-fi space opera about alien invaders bent on the conquest (and digestion) of all humanity, it’s also a barbed commentary on Obamamania that will infuriate the president’s supporters and delight his detractors.

“We’re all so quick to jump on the bandwagon,” observes one character. “A ride on the bandwagon, it sounds like fun. But before we get on, let us at least make sure it is sturdy.”

The bandwagon in this case is conspicuously saucer-shaped. “V” starts with the arrival of a couple of dozen ships from outer space, piloted by creatures who look like humans except a lot prettier. “Don’t be frightened,” says their luminously beautiful leader Anna (Morena Baccarin, “Serenity”). “We mean no harm.”

The aliens — who become known as V’s, for visitors — quickly enthrall their wide-eyed human hosts.

A handful of dissidents hold out against the rapturous reception given the V’s. Some are simply uneasy, such as the youthful priest Father Jack (Joel Gretsch, “The 4400”), who sharply criticizes the Vatican’s embrace of the V’s as divine creations: “Rattlesnakes are God’s creatures too.”

With or without the political sheen, “V” is sweeping television storytelling at its best. Whether you choose to view it as a blood-and-guts war story, a spy thriller (unlike the original show, these V’s are perfect replicas of humans, so you never really know who might be sitting beside you at the bar), a high-stakes family drama (as households divide over the intentions of the V’s), a religious allegory (the V’s make a crippled man walk, filling up churches again) or just a sci-fi throwback to the days of “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” and “The Thing,” “V” is irresistible. This bandwagon is definitely worth jumping on.

By BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE and MATT APUZZO

President Barack Obama’s economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan. Trouble is, only 508 people work there.

The Georgia nonprofit’s inflated job count is among persisting errors in the government’s latest effort to measure the effect of the $787 billion stimulus plan despite White House promises last week that the new data would undergo an “extensive review” to root out errors discovered in an earlier report.

About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren’t saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren’t saved.

That type of accounting was found in an earlier AP review of stimulus jobs, which the Obama administration said was misleading because most of the government’s job-counting errors were being fixed in the new data.

The administration now acknowledges overcounting in the new numbers for the HHS program. Elizabeth Oxhorn, a spokeswoman for the White House recovery office, said the Obama administration was reviewing the Head Start data “to determine how and if it will be counted.”

But officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.

“If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job,” HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.

The latest stimulus report, released Friday, significantly overstates the number of jobs spared with money from programs serving families and children, mostly the Head Start preschool program. The report shows hundreds of the programs used nearly $323 million to provide pay raises and other benefits to their existing employees.

The raises themselves were appropriate — the stimulus law set aside money for Head Start salary increases — but converting that number into jobs proved difficult. The Obama administration told Head Start officials to consider a fraction of each employee as a job saved.

“That’s more than ridiculous,” said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner.

Many Head Start programs around the country went further, counting everyone who received a raise as a job saved.

“It’s a glitch in the system,” said Ben Allen, the research director at the National Head Start Association. “There was some misunderstanding among some in the Head Start community about completing the reporting requirements.”

Allen said a cost-of-living adjustment “may not be viewed traditionally as a job saved, but one could interpret it that, by providing COLA, you’re retaining staff.”

The Bergen County Community Action Program in Hackensack, N.J., noted the nearly $213,000 it received went to cover raises for existing staff only, but it also reported saving 85 jobs.

At Southwest Georgia Community Action Council in Moultrie, Ga., director Myrtis Mulkey-Ndawula said she followed the guidelines the Obama administration provided. She said she multiplied the 508 employees by 1.84 — the percentage pay raise they received — and came up with 935 jobs saved.

“I would say it’s confusing at best,” she said. “But we followed the instructions we were given.”

Ed DeSeve, who oversees the stimulus at the White House, said the Head Start numbers “represent a few percent of all jobs reported” and said the problems would probably be balanced out by other errors that underreported jobs.

“So we don’t expect any corrections to this data to meaningfully impact the total 640,000 direct jobs,” DeSeve said.

More than 250 other community agencies in the U.S. similarly reported saving jobs when using the money to give pay raises, to pay for training and continuing education, to extend employee work hours or to buy equipment, according to their spending reports.

Other agencies didn’t count the raises as jobs saved, reporting zero jobs.

Last week’s stimulus report claimed 640,000 jobs saved or created by the economic recovery plan so far. Those jobs came from 156,614 federal contracts, grants and loans awarded to more than 62,000 recipients, worth a total of $215 billion.

Obama has promised the stimulus would save or create 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year, and the data released Friday represented the first head count toward that goal.