Free Republic

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — I thought my son would be much older before I had to tell him about the Black Male Code. He's only 12, still sleeping with stuffed animals, still afraid of the dark. But after the Trayvon Martin tragedy, I needed to explain to my child that soon people might be afraid of him. We were in the car on the way to school when a story about Martin came on the radio. "The guy who killed him should get arrested. The dead guy was unarmed!" my son said after hearing that neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman had...

Any conviction that open source software (OSS) is somehow inferior to proprietary code, or vice versa, depending on which side of the development fence you sit, is being dispelled by a report from Coverity.The company has been scanning millions of lines of open source code for its 2011 Coverity Scan Open Source Integrity Report. The results show that the free code quality is on a par with in-house-developed products.More thoroughly tested The company said that this year’s study has been massively upgraded with the introduction of the Coverity 5 development testing platform. The new analysis engine incorporates advances in static...

NK military changes communication system to avoid wiretaps DECEMBER 24, 2011 20:34 The South Korean military has obtained intelligence that top brass in North Korea are changing communication frequencies and encrypting system to avoid wiretapping. The move comes after South Korean media reported that Kim Jong Un, the successor to the late leader Kim Jong Il, gave his first order to his military just before the Dec. 19 announcement of his father`s death. A military source said Friday that the South Korean military has had trouble collecting special intelligence obtained by wiretapping North Korean telecommunications since South Korean media reported...

NOTE The following text is a quote: http://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2011/alleged-terrorist-indicted-in-new-york-for-the-murder-of-five-american-soldiers Alleged Terrorist Indicted in New York for the Murder of Five American Soldiers U.S. Attorney’s Office December 09, 2011 Eastern District of New York NEW YORK—Today, a federal grand jury in Brooklyn, N.Y., returned an indictment charging Faruq Khalil Muhammad ‘Isa, 38, aka “Faruk Khalil Muhammad ‘Isa,” “Sayfildin Tahir Sharif” and “Tahir Sharif Sayfildin,” with aiding in the murder of five American soldiers in a suicide-bomb attack in Iraq in April 2009. Specifically, he is charged with the murders of Staff Sergeant Gary L. Woods, 24, of Lebanon Junction, Ky.; Sergeant First...

One of Barack Obama's job creation programs appears to be working – the number of federal government regulators along with their budgets has exploded since 2008. Total employment at the conglomeration of federal agencies responsible for enforcing compliance with the myriad of laws now exceeds 281,000 people.  That's an increase of 13 percent during a time when 27 million Americans find themselves unemployed, under-employed, or have completely given up even trying to find work.  The budgets at these same agencies have increased 16 percent during the same period to over $54 billion.With the expanded staffs, the agencies have ramped up...

A cryptic code sent by the Zodiac killer on November 8, 1969 to San Francisco Chronicle has baffled authorities for decades, until now. Now a 27-year-old man is claiming he cracked this code as well as the identity of the Zodiac killer, who murdered at least seven people in the late 60s. Corey Starliper of Tewksbury, Massachusetts, was intrigued by the case after watching a 2007 movie "Zodiac" about the killings. He claims to have spent nine hours working on cracking the code. "I found it exciting, that I was actually able to get into his head when nobody had...

The looming political showdown over raising the federal debt ceiling has generated a seemingly endless stream of punditry over winners and losers, key players versus back-benchers, and on-again, off-again "grand compromises." But beneath those ever-shifting currents lie bedrock fiscal issues: how to slow the pace of federal expenditures, reestablish long-term budgetary discipline, and reform our uncompetitive tax system without heaping heavier burdens on businesses or individuals. In their quest for a staggering $2.4 trillion debt increase, President Obama and his allies on Capitol Hill have weighed in with many responses to those issues - some good, more than a few...

~ EXCERPT ~ The battle over the federal deficit hasn’t flipped in favor of the Democrats. The GOP isn’t suddenly at grave risk of losing its House majority. But after two years of getting pummeled over spending and the size of government, Democrats now appear to have found a political weapon that’s capable of evening out the fight: Medicare. The popular entitlement program wasn’t the sole issue behind Kathy Hochul’s upset victory in a New York special election Tuesday night, but strategists in both parties say it was an important force. And for the first time since November, the idea...

NEW YORK – Recalling Dan Brown's bestselling novel "The Da Vinci Code," computer experts have discovered strange anomalies in the Obama birth record released by the White House. They include a different birth registration number that shows up in "hidden text," remnants of the short-form certificate apparently bleeding through the long-form and a "smiley face" in the registrar's stamp that does not show up on other recently issued Hawaii birth records. Curiously, in a simple process run by Optical Character Recognition software that reveals hidden text, the registration number 10611 turns up, instead of 10641, the number displayed on the...

The real mystery lurking in the chapel where Dan Brown set The Da Vinci Code. From the outside, the Rosslyn Chapel does not look like a suitable place to hide Jesus' head. It's not much bigger than a country church, standing inconspicuously on a small hill in the miniature Scottish town of Roslin, a few miles south of Edinburgh. Its Gothic pinnacles, flying buttresses, and pointed arches have been battered by 500 years of capricious weather, and for years it has been encased in an exoskeleton of scaffolding as restoration efforts plod along. Until recently, it was covered by a...

The September11 terror attacks in the US were staged to overcome disunity in al-Qa'ida, confidential computer records reveal. Alan Cullison reports on what happened after his laptop was wrecked while he was covering the combat in Afghanistan IN the autumn of 2001, I was one of scores of journalists who ventured into northern Afghanistan to write about the US-assisted war against the Taliban. After losing use of my computer in an accident, I scrawled stories by candlelight with a ballpoint pen and read dispatches to my editors at The Wall Street Journal over a satellite phone. When the Taliban's defences...

How many pages does it take to lay out the insanely complicated rules and requirements of our tax code? According to tax publisher CCH, the total number of pages devoted to federal tax code rules, IRS rulings, and regulations has grown to 72,536:It's no wonder that even the government's own experts and officials can't figure it out. Any system of rules that requires in excess 72,000 pages to explain and understand borders on useless. At this point it might as well be Calvinball. Via Cato's Chris Edwards.

In a study published last week by the Laffer Center, my colleagues Wayne Winegarden, John Childs and I estimate that these costs alone are a staggering $431 billion annually. This is a cost markup of 30 cents on every dollar paid in taxes. And this is not even a complete accounting of the costs of tax complexity.

WASHINGTON -- A lifelong fan of codes, Ricky McCormick wrote out two pages of letters, numbers and symbols and stuck them in his pocket. His body was found in a Missouri cornfield in the summer of 1999, those two sheets of paper still in his pants. ALPONTE GLSE - SE ERTE, one line read. Is that a coded plea for help? A reminder to pick up the laundry from the cleaners? The beginnings of a commentary on the weather in St. Louis? If you know, the FBI's top code-breaking unit wants your help in breaking McCormick's code - one that...

A lifelong fan of codes, Ricky McCormick wrote out two pages of letters, numbers and symbols and stuck them in his pocket. His body was found in a Missouri cornfield in the summer of 1999, those two sheets of paper still in his pants. ALPONTE GLSE - SE ERTE, one line read. Is that a coded plea for help? A reminder to pick up the laundry from the cleaners? The beginnings of a commentary on the weather in St. Louis? If you know, the FBI's top code-breaking unit wants your help in breaking McCormick's code — one that has baffled...

ATD At the Doctor's BFF: Best Friend Fell BTW: Bring the Wheelchair BYOT: Bring Your Own Teeth CMB: Covered by Medicare CUATSC: See you at the Senior Center DWI: Driving While Incontinent FWIW: Forgot Where I was FYI: Found Your Insulin GGPBL: Gotta Go, Pacemaker Battery Low HGBM: Had Good Bowel Movement GHA: Got Heartburn Again IMHO: Is My Hearing Aid On LMDO: Laughing My Dentures out LOL: Living on Lipitor OMSG: Oh My Sorry, Gas ROFL.CGU Rolling on the floor Laughing and Can't get UP SGGP: Sorry Gotta go Poop TTYL; Talk to You Louder WTP: Where's the prunces...

Part of the mystery behind an 'alien' book no one can read has at last been unraveled. Found in a chest of books outside Rome by a dealer in antique books, the Voynich manuscript is among literature's great mysteries. The book of aging parchment is written in alien characters, some resembling Latin letters, others unlike anything used in any known language, and arranged into what appear to be words and sentences -- except they don't resemble anything written or read by human beings. And for decades, the manuscript has mystified scientists. "Is it a code, a cipher of some kind?"...

While enthusiasts across the world pored over the Voynich manuscript, penned by an unknown author in a language no one understands, a research team at the University of Arizona solved one of its biggest mysteries: When was the book made?University of Arizona researchers have cracked one of the puzzles surrounding what has been called "the world's most mysterious manuscript" – the Voynich manuscript, a book filled with drawings and writings nobody has been able to make sense of to this day. Using radiocarbon dating, a team led by Greg Hodgins in the UA's department of physics has found the manuscript's...

Napolitano: Colored threats replaced by 'formal, detailed alerts' in three months By Jordy Yager - 01/27/11 03:42 PM ET Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced on Thursday that the department is planning to phase out its color-coded threat advisory system over the next three months. In its place, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to issue “formal, detailed alerts” about “a specific or credible terrorist threat” to law enforcement officials, private businesses – such as shopping malls or hotels – and the American public, depending on the nature of the threat. “These alerts will include a clear statement that...

WASHINGTON—Welcome to the world of the temporary tax code. In the late 1990s, there were typically fewer than a dozen tax provisions that had just a limited lease on life and needed to be renewed every year or so. Today there are 141. Now Congress, taking up a deal worked out between the Obama administration and Republican leaders, is poised to turn the whole personal income-tax system into something of a temporary structure. The plan embraces a broad range of provisions—an extension of Bush-era rates, a new estate-tax formula—but for only two years. A payroll-tax cut in the bill is...