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Senate committee approves Yellen nomination

NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

Janet Yellen moved one step closer to becoming the next chair of the Federal Reserve, after the Senate Banking Committee voted to move her nomination forward for a full Senate vote, Thursday.

The committee voted 14-8 to send Yellen's nomination on for consideration before the full Senate. That vote on the Senate floor has not yet been scheduled, but is expected to occur in early December.

Three Republicans joined Democrats on the committee in voting in favor of Yellen: Bob Corker of Tennessee, Mark Kirk of Illinois and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia was the only Democrat to vote against her nomination.

Related: Smooth sailing for Yellen in front of Senate

President Obama nominated Yellen to serve as chairwoman of the Federal Reserve after Ben Bernanke's term expires January 31. Despite objections from a few Republicans, she is widely expected to be confirmed for the position.

Obamacare's big winners: Insurers. Oops!

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul R. La Monica. Other than Time Warner, the parent of CNNMoney, Abbott Laboratories and AbbVie, La Monica does not own positions in any individual stocks.

The president is not going to like reading this. But I've got some more troubling news to share about Obamacare.

It's bad enough that the HealthCare.gov site makes Ticketmaster.com look like an exemplar of reliability. But it is also becoming increasingly obvious that the giant health insurance companies are the biggest winners of the Affordable Care Act ... and not the consumers who need insurance.

Humana (HUM) and Cigna (CI) both hit all-time highs Thursday. WellPoint (WLP) is trading just shy of the record price it reached Wednesday. Aetna (AET) and UnitedHealth (UNH) are only about 2% below their peaks.

The iShares US Healthcare Providers exchange-traded fund (IHF), which owns these Big Five insurers as well as shares of hospital operators and nursing homes, is up nearly 35% this year -- better than the broader market. And most of the big insurers have outperformed the IHF.

Call Of Duty

Life is wonderful

Iphone 5s Features

A chip with 64-bit architecture. A fingerprint identity sensor. A better, faster camera. And an operating system built specifically for 64-bit. Any one of these features in a smartphone would make it ahead of its time. All of these features in a smartphone make it an iPhone that’s definitely ahead of its time.

iPhone 5s is precision crafted down to the micron. And it’s evident throughout. The beautiful aluminum housing. The sleekness of metal and glass. Sapphire crystal in the Home button. And more sapphire crystal protecting the iSight camera. Design and construction of this level is unmatched. As a result, iPhone 5s looks and feels unbelievably thin and light. And it’s available in three elegant expressions: gold, silver, and space gray.

Learn more about the design of iPhone 5s

You check your iPhone dozens and dozens of times a day, probably more. Entering a passcode each time just slows you down. But you do it because making sure no one else has access to your iPhone is important. With iPhone 5s, getting into your phone is faster, easier, and even a little futuristic. Introducing Touch ID — a new fingerprint identity sensor.

Put your finger on the Home button, and just like that your iPhone unlocks. It’s a convenient and highly secure way to access your phone. Your fingerprint can also approve purchases from iTunes Store, the App Store, and the iBooks Store, so you don’t have to enter your password. And Touch ID is capable of 360-degree readability. Which means no matter what its orientation — portrait, landscape, or anything in between — your iPhone reads your fingerprint and knows who you are. And because Touch ID lets you enroll multiple fingerprints, it knows the people you trust, too.

There’s fast. And then there’s A7 fast. The new A7 chip gives you CPU and graphics performance up to 2x faster than the A6 chip. Even more impressive, A7 makes iPhone 5s the first 64-bit smartphone in the world — that’s desktop-class architecture in a superslim phone. And because iOS 7 was built specifically for 64-bit, it’s uniquely designed to take advantage of the A7 chip.

A7 supports OpenGL ES version 3.0 to deliver the kind of detailed graphics and complex visual effects once possible only on Mac computers, PCs, and gaming consoles. The difference is amazing. Take the imaginary worlds in games, for instance. Textures and shadows look more true to life. Sunlight reflects off the water. The whole experience feels much more realistic.

iOS 7 and all the built-in apps are optimized for the A7 chip. The Camera app is a great example. It takes advantage of a new image signal processor built into A7 to give you up to 2x faster autofocus, faster photo capture, and higher video frame rates.1 You’d think with all this going on, battery life would suffer. But it doesn’t, because A7 is designed to be incredibly energy efficient.

The new M7 coprocessor is like a sidekick to the A7 chip. It’s designed specifically to measure motion data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass — a task that would normally fall to the A7 chip. But M7 is much more efficient at it. Now fitness apps that track physical activity can access that data from the M7 coprocessor without constantly engaging the A7 chip. So they require less battery power.

M7 knows when you’re walking, running, or even driving. For example, Maps switches from driving to walking turn-by-turn navigation if, say, you park and continue on foot. And if your phone hasn’t moved for a while, like when you’re asleep, M7 reduces network pinging to spare your battery.

iPhone 5s features advanced technologies custom designed for the iSight camera’s hardware and software. So anyone anywhere can take an amazing photo at any time. It simply makes more sense to teach iPhone how to take a great picture rather than teach people how to be expert photographers. Here are just some of the capabilities of the new iSight camera.

Watch the iSight Camera video View actual photos taken with iPhone 5s

Larger sensor. Larger