Free Republic

SPOKANE, Wash. - Scientists have discovered the first nest of so-called murder hornets in the United States and plan to wipe it out Saturday to protect native honeybees, officials in Washington state said. After weeks of searching, the agency said it found the nest of Asian giant hornets in Blaine, a city north of Seattle near the Canadian border. Bad weather delayed plans to destroy the nest Friday. The world's largest hornet at 2 inches long, the invasive insects can decimate entire hives of honeybees and deliver painful stings to people. The nest was found after a worker for the...

When an orthodontist asked the reporter if he wanted a good story idea, the reporter, of course, said "yes." Jeff Donn, a national writer with The Associated Press and 2012 Pulitzer finalist, was doubtful, at first, about that tip from his son's orthodontist: There's no solid evidence that flossing actually works. "But when I started to look at research, I realized that it was a good tip — and definitely the best one I ever got from an orthodontist." As a reporter who's covered the dangers of aging nuclear power plants, drug safety and abandoned oil wells, Donn was attracted...

Open source wireless router firmware may become tougher to install in the United States, if not illegal. That's if device manufacturers interpret new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules involving radio frequencies to mean that user-modified software should be banned. The rules require manufacturers of wireless routers to "implement security features in any digitally modulated devices capable of operating in any of the U-NII bands, so that third parties are not able to reprogram the device to operate outside the parameters for which the device was certified."In non-geek terms, that means users shouldn't be able to change their routers's radio frequencies,...

It has been over two weeks now since Microsoft support for Windows XP expired. So far, the world as we know it has not come to a grinding halt for Windows XP users, but that isn’t a reason to let your guard down—it’s really just a matter of time. With hundreds of millions of Windows XP systems still in use by businesses, government agencies, and individuals around the world, maybe Microsoft Microsoft should make the operating system open source and let developers take over. When May 13 rolls around, things might start to look different. Many XP users viewed April...

Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one was definitely an attempt to insert a backdoor. But we don’t know who it was that made the attempt—and we probably never will.Back in 2003 Linux used a system called BitKeeper to store the master copy of the Linux source code. If a developer wanted...

Do you depend on your computer for your living? If so, I'm sure you've thought long and hard about which hardware and software to use. I'd like to explain why I use generic "white boxes" running open source software. These give me a platform I rely on for 100% availability. They also provide a low-cost solution with excellent security and privacy. People's requirements vary, so what I use may not be the best choice for you. I'm a support person for databases and operating systems. I also do consulting that involves research, presenting, and writing. I use my own computers...

Are Humans Becoming Less Intelligent? By Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer | LiveScience.com – Mon, Nov 12, 2012 Humans may be gradually losing intelligence, according to a new study. The study, published today (Nov. 12) in the journal Trends in Genetics, argues that humans lost the evolutionary pressure to be smart once we started living in dense agricultural settlements several thousand years ago. "The development of our intellectual abilities and the optimization of thousands of intelligence genes probably occurred in relatively non-verbal, dispersed groups of peoples [living] before our ancestors emerged from Africa," said study author Gerald Crabtree, a researcher...

Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm a big fan of OpenOffice.org, and that I think it has the potential to break through into the mainstream. Maybe it's already begun, judging by these figures from webmasterpro.de: The numbers were collected using a novel methodology: Over two hundred thousand international visitors where analysed by the web statistics service FlashCounter. By checking (using Javascript) which fonts where installed on the system, we could identify the installed Office suites. Spread around the world, those 200,000 users aren't a huge number, so I'd take the numbers quoted with large doses of NaCl....

WASHINGTON - Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday. A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him. If his mother had been insured. If his family had not lost its Medicaid. If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to find. If his mother hadn't been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth. By the time Deamonte's own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George's County boy died. Deamonte's death...