Free Republic

I was just listening to Gerald Celente on Coast to Coast AM with George Norry. And I have to say, he is completely right. He is right. He's saying, that America needs to bring back businesses and jobs, back to Americans. (well that wasn't exactly what he said, but that was what I heard and I completely agree) Globalists are the biggest problem these days.

...And 80% of Windows phone owners desert the ecosystem for Android or iOS. Windows phone shipments took a nose-dive in the third quarter, plummeting 35% from the same period in 2014, researcher Gartner said today. By comparison, total global smartphone shipments climbed 15% in the third quarter. Of the 353 million smartphones shipped in the September quarter worldwide, less than 6 million were powered by Microsoft's Windows, making Windows' share 1.7%, Gartner estimated, down from 3% in the same quarter of 2014. Windows phones shipments tumbled in some of the historic strongholds for the OS, said Roberta Cozza, a Gartner...

The Food and Drug Administration has approved an easy-to-use version of the life-saving drug that reverses heroin and prescription painkiller overdoses, as communities across the country grapple with a wave of drug abuse. The reformulated drug, sold as Narcan, comes as a nasal spray and should help first responders, police and others deliver the antidote in emergency situations. Known generically as naloxone, the drug reverses the effects of opioids, drugs that include legal painkillers such as oxycodone and illegal narcotics such as heroin. ...

OLED screens deliver better picture quality, consume less electricity and promise wider profit margins than LCDs. But many rivals including leader Samsung Electronics Co Ltd have said production was still too costly for the mass market. In an indication of rapid OLED development, LG Electronics said production improvements allowed it to cut prices of six models in the world's biggest TV market by as much as 45 percent from last month, without crimping margins. Two are now below $2,000, a fraction of the $14,999 of LG's first OLED TV in 2013.

LOS ANGELES >> U.S. Customs officials seized 450 illegal pork tamales from a passenger coming through LAX from Mexico earlier this month. "Although tamales are a popular holiday tradition, foreign meat products can carry serious animal diseases from countries affected by outbreaks of Avian Influenza, Mad Cow and Swine Fever," said Anne Maricich, CBP Acting Director of Field Operations in Los Angeles in a written statement. "Every day CBP agriculture specialists prevent the intentional and unintentional introduction of harmful pests and foreign animal diseases into the U.S."

Help teach Cortana to say 'Sorry, Dave' Microsoft's decided that it, too, wants to open source some of its machine learning space, publishing its Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK) on Github. Google released some of its code last week. Redmond's (co-incidental?) response is pretty basic: there's a framework, and two algorithms, but Microsoft Research promises it will get extended in the future. The DMTK Framework is front-and-centre, since that's where both extensions will happen. It's a two-piece critter, consisting of a parameter server and a client SDK. The parameter server has "separate data structures for high- and low-frequency parameters", Microsoft...

A scanning electron microscope image of newly-grown enamel using amelogenin-chitosan hydrogel. Credit: Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC ==================================================================================================== Dual discoveries at USC propose a promising method to regrow nonliving hard tissue, lessening or even eliminating pain associated with tooth decay, which the National Institutes of Health calls the most prevalent chronic disease. Janet Moradian-Oldak, a professor at the Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC, has investigated methods to regrow tooth enamel for the past two decades. The process is especially tricky because unlike bone, mature enamel cannot rejuvenate. Tooth enamel is a nonliving tissue. The a-ha moment...

Businesses and enterprise customers are very excited about Windows 10, according to a new report by Forrester Research. It's weird, because big organizations are usually the last to want to adopt any new technology, let alone a whole operating system. And yet, more than 49% of enterprises responding to Forrester's survey plan on going to Windows 10 in 2016, per the report. That doesn't sound like much. Indeed, Forrester itself says that those numbers tend to be optimistic. But compared to Windows 8, which Forrester says garnered a 22% positive response to the same question in 2012, the year it...

Gun crime plummets as gun sales rise…

McDonald's isn't alone in struggling to get customers to let go of the $1 price. Wendy's tried replacing its 99-cent menu with a "Right Price Right Size" menu, but acknowledged the switch wasn't doing the job. Last month, it began promoting a limited-time "4 for $4" deal that includes a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger, chicken nuggets, fries and a drink. Deborah Wahl, senior vice president of marketing for the U.S., said the McPick platform was designed to give people options. “Customers are looking for choice and flexibility. That’s sort of the new definition of value,” she said. While deals remain a...

Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually. In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by +52.8% from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989. Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses....

The U.S. Air Force is developing a new bomber that promises to secure the U.S. advantage in modern warfare. The next-generation long-range strike bomber, recently awarded to Northrop Grumman Corp. NOC, +4.36% for development, will not be designed to rely on as yet undeveloped technologies, as is so often the case with new aircraft and weaponry. Instead, the aircraft will combine and fully exploit existing advanced stealth technology, integrated software, ordnance and countermeasures. In effect, the military is consolidating the best of its technology in one package. At the same time, the U.S. Air Force has decided to aggregate all...

Apple's mobile operating system iOS has not only transformed the company, but it also helped shape the mobile revolution. Image source: Apple.In no uncertain terms, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has been instrumental in launching the mobile revolution. Consumers use mobile devices in ways they never could have dreamed of a decade ago, and the rise of mobile platforms created incredible new opportunities for many industries as the PC market matured.This was all made possible by the creation of iOS, which powers Apple's mobile devices. When iOS was being developed, Apple executives debated whether they should start with the iPod operating system and...

Apple's iPad Pro, which starts at $799 without the Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil. (AP Photo/Eric Rosberg) The story of computing has been one of converging more and more services into one place, as the video "Evolution of the Desk" from Harvard's School of Computing illustrates below. With so much overlap now between things you can do on a smartphone and on a desktop computer, there's been much talk of convergence between the two. Google, for instance, is widely thought to be working on bringing its mobile platform Android together with its "browser only" operating system Chrome, which is found...

Apple's record profits in the three months ended Sept. 27 were driven by strong sales of its iPhone 6 and its latest model, the iPhone 6S. Apple Inc. may not be the biggest maker of smartphones -- that distinction goes to Samsung -- but it is gobbling up almost all smartphone profits so far in 2015, according to new numbers from Canaccord Genuity. Apple took a whopping 94 percent of the total operating income of the nine top global smartphone makers in the three-month period ended in September, up from 85 percent in the year prior, according to analyst Mike...

Practical homomorphic encryption manual released As genome research - and the genomes themselves - get passed around the scientific community, the world's woken up to the security and privacy risks this can involve. A Microsoft research quintet has therefore published ways to help scientists work on genomic data while reducing the risk of data theft. The team published an informal manual to help scientists and other researchers to use the Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library (SEAL). Homomorphic encryption is a technique in which software can operate on encrypted data without decrypting it. This would let hospitals and labs to work on...

Same name, very different results If you held back on installing November's Patch Tuesday updates last week after Microsoft fumbled an Outlook patch, it's apparently safe to go back in the water. Many IT managers and normal folks held off on last week's patching cycle after one Microsoft fix - KB 3097877 - broke several versions of Outlook. The error came in how the software handled fonts, and resulted in the email client crashing as soon as some emails were scrolled through. "We have re-released KB 3097877 for Windows 7 to address the Outlook difficulties that some customers experienced. We...

I have three within a mile of my house. Two are at opposite ends of one mall and a third one is in another mall? I can't see how they stay in business even if the workers are illegal? aliens? who are paid slave wages. Are they a scam to get low interest Federal SBA loans? Then do a a bust out bankruptcy? Fronts for immigration scams? Are some of them fronts for Chinese investors who want visas? The can score a visa if they invest half a million dollars in a US business. I believe they can bring their...

Microsoft has officially buried its Zune music service, though it was already a distant memory for a lot of music fans. The Zune music service was discontinued on Sunday and users are now no longer able to stream or download content. Instead, Microsoft encourages users to try out their 3-year-old Groove Music, a digital music streaming service which boasts a music catalog of over 38 million tracks. Zune device owners are not affected and can continue to listen to and transfer music without a problem. Microsoft launched its Zune portable player and music service in 2006 as a response to...

Severe weather caused 333 deaths in the United States in 2014, according to the National Weather Service's Summary of Natural Hazard Statistics for 2014. That was the fewest in 22 years. "Fortunately, the United States was again spared any major land falling tropical storms. There were no U.S. tropical storm related deaths in 2014," according to the report. The last time there were fewer "fatalities caused by severe weather" was in 1992, when 308 such deaths were recorded, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "For the third consecutive year, weather-related deaths dropped significantly," said the NOAA summary. NOAA...