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In just a few years, communities that depend on the trucking industry for their vitality will be facing major economic disruption.Roscoe, Nebraska, is a good place to contemplate how the evolution of long-haul travel can change a community. This unincorporated settlement—some classify Roscoe as a “semi-ghost town”—sits about seven miles east of the city of Ogallala along U.S. 30, which follows the old Lincoln Highway route and before that, various overland migration trails to California, Oregon and Utah. Just off U.S. 30, opposite the Union Pacific freight-rail tracks, there’s an abandoned gas station with its former pump, pictured above, standing...

My Firefox is running very very slow compared to Explorer running FreeRepublic. Any ideas?

There are moments when I come thisclose to quitting Twitter. The amount of hatred squeezed into 140 characters or less by lunatics usually cloaked in anonymity is enough to make you question your support for the First Amendment and your faith in the decency of other people. To the uninitiated, the torrent of bigotry can leave you feeling violated. Even the most seasoned, battle-scarred, seen-it-all, canÂ’t-nuthinÂ’-shock-me individual will be left O-o by the filth in his or her Twitter feed. A story I just read by David Badash at thenewcivilrightsmovement.com about the welcome President Obama got upon joining Twitter left...

Google, the world’s largest search engine, is gargantuan in size and clout, but still small enough to fit in Barack Obama’s back pocket Conservative websites like Canada Free Press (CFP) owe a debt of gratitude to plucky ‘Citizen Journalist’, news researcher cum laude, Tina Siegert of News the Media Won’t Show You. Though some might not yet realize its full impact, all conservative websites are under Google suppression now that Google has claimed rights as the Grand Central of Internet Truth. Google will no longer drive traffic to Conservative websites. Internet traffic is what gets all websites Internet advertising. Without...

You might guess that Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher who recently penned the bestseller "God, Guns, Grits and Gravy," is a PC guy (as in computers, not consciousness). Wrong. "I'm an Apple snob," Huckabee declared here Friday. "I have pretty much everything Apple."

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Friday that drones will be an issue for federal, state and local security during the 2016 presidential race. Johnson made the comments in response to a question from NBC's Chuck Todd, who asked him whether the Secret Service was "panicked" about the proliferation of drones. Todd said he wondered how it would effect security at outdoor campaign events in 2016. “It is definitely an issue,” Johnson replied on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”He then went into an anecdote about a drone flying over his head at a graduation ceremony. “I was giving a commencement address a...

Lucknow, May 13 (PTI) Realising that social media with its massive reach and lightning speed has the potential "to affect law and order", especially in sensitive areas, Akhilesh Yadav government is setting up two "laboratories" to be manned by police to monitor content and prevent any trouble. "The (Uttar Pradesh) government has sanctioned two social media labs in Lucknow and Meerut and work is on for setting them up very soon, may be within two months," ADG (Traffic) Anil Agarwal, who is looking after all the IT projects of the state police, told PTI. The officers and Sub-inspectors, who will...

A Subway sandwich shop worker whose social media posts about Saturday's killing of two police officers in Mississippi sparked outrage online said her comments were misconstrued — and now she's being threatened. "They took the status the wrong way," Sierra McCurdy of Laurel, Mississippi, told NBC News Monday. McCurdy wrote the Facebook post following news of the fatal shooting of two officers, Benjamin J. Deen, 34, and Liquori Tate, 25, during a traffic stop in Hattiesburg. "2 police officers was shot in hattiesburg tonight…GOT EM," read the post, which also included a crying-laughing emoticon and a gun emoji. "They took...

Caffeinated Thoughts completed a non-scientific poll of our readership from May 1-8, 2015. U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) leads overall being first choice for just shy of 37% of those polled. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) leads among Iowan readers with almost 29% saying he is their first choice. Our overall results (1st Choice): 1. U.S. Senator Rand Paul – 36.8% 2. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz – 19.6% 3. Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum – 11.2% 4. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry – 8.0% 5. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal – 5.2% 6. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio – 4.0% 7. Former...

"DISK BOOT FAILURE - Insert system disk and press enter" Doing just that produces no result. I've tried booting with the system disk I used to install W7 on this machine, and with two repair disks created on other 32 bit W7 machines, and get the "This version of System Recovery Options is not compatible" message with them all. I have a Windows PE install on a flash drive which will boot and let me in to look at the drives. I've been able to copy all the files from the boot partition to another USB drive, and run chkdsk...

NSA telephone metadata program Following last Thursday’s federal appeals court decision, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) has issued a legal sidebar on the possible impacts of this Second Circuit ruling against bulk collection on USA PATRIOT Act reauthorization: On May 7, 2015, a federal appeals court issued a decision in American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper that could have significant implications for both the telephone metadata collection program operated by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the legislative debate surrounding consideration of the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015 (H.R. 2048 S. 1123) currently taking place in the House and the...

‘Finally, neural networks that actually work.” So reads the headline in Wired, and, really, haven’t we all been waiting? (Yes, we have, even if we do not know it.) The article concerns artificial-intelligence innovator Jeff Dean, who as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota 25 years ago created a rudimentary “neural network” — a computer system sophisticated enough to learn — but was hobbled by the available computing power of the time. Now working at Google, he’s helping to create vastly powerful and subtle networks that recognize faces and spoken language. A few pages over, there’s a wonderful if...

3-D printing, or additive manufacturing, is likely to revolutionize business in the next several years. Often dismissed in the popular mindset as a tool for home-based “makers” of toys and trinkets, the technology is gaining momentum in large-scale industry. Already it has moved well beyond prototyping and, as I explain in a new HBR article, it will increasingly be used to produce high-volume parts and products in several industries. Since I prepared that article, new developments have only strengthened the case for a 3-D future – and heightened the urgency for management teams to adjust their strategies. Impressive next-generation technologies...

Certain biases remain acceptable. There’s a full-fledged boycott against two gay New York City hoteliers who recently hosted an event in their home for Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas). How would the media react if a Republican business owner hosted an event for a gay politician – and mainstream Republican-friendly organizations boycotted them as a result? There would rightfully be outrage. The two gay hotel owners have been attacked and harmed financially – despite their long history as activists and philanthropists – for hosting a discussion with Cruz. (It wasn’t even a fundraiser.) This is the liberal thought...

A nice first step. This afternoon, a New York federal appeals court ruled that the NSA’s warrantless collection of domestic phone data is illegal. This will come as welcome news to those of us who would rather not trade freedom for a false sense of security. As the New York Times reports: In a 97-page ruling, a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that a provision of the Act permitting the Federal Bureau of Investigation to collect business records deemed relevant to a counterterrorism investigation cannot be legitimately interpreted to permit the...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-07/conservative-boy-wonder

It's Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz leaving everyone else in the dust - on Facebook, that is. According to data provided by the social media giant, Clinton and Cruz registered the most Facebook "interactions" -- meaning likes, comments, posts and shares -- in the 24 hours surrounding the launch of their presidential campaigns. Clinton, who used Facebook to showcase the video announcing her White House bid, won a whopping 10.1 million interactions from 4.7 million unique users in the period around her official announcement. Cruz, the first presidential candidate to make his run official, registered 5.5 million interactions when he...

Folks, there is exactly one way you're going to put a stop to this sort of nonsense: At the end of October, IT employees at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts were called, one-by-one, into conference rooms to receive notice of their layoffs. Multiple conference rooms had been set aside for this purpose, and in each room an executive read from a script informing the worker that their last day would be Jan. 30, 2015. Some workers left the rooms crying; others appeared shocked. This went on all day. As each employee received a call to go to a conference room,...

* Internet speeds have increased by 50-fold in the last decade alone * Optical fibres have reached capacity and cannot transfer any more light * Laying down more cables may solve problem but this will increase costs * 'It is harder and harder to keep ahead,' said Professor Andrew EllisThe internet is heading towards a 'capacity crunch' as it fails to keep up with our demand for ever faster data, scientists have warned. Leading engineers, physicists and telecoms firms have been summoned to a meeting at London's Royal Society later this month, to discuss what can be done to...

“You can’t really understand what is going on now without understanding what came before.” Steve Jobs is explaining why, as a young man, he spent so much time with the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs a generation older, men like Robert Noyce, Andy Grove, and Regis McKenna. It’s a beautiful Saturday morning in May, 2003, and I’m sitting next to Jobs on his living room sofa, interviewing him for a book I’m writing. I ask him to tell me more about why he wanted, as he put it, “to smell that second wonderful era of the valley, the semiconductor companies leading into...