Free Republic

YouTube has a brand new censorship tactic that appears to be affecting small creators – and one that, on the face of it, makes no sense. Several livestreams posted on Google’s platform last weekend by truckers protesting in Canada have had their audience limited. The reason given to viewers trying to access the videos? They were too popular. “Video unavailable: This video is popular! Due to limited creator history, we’re limiting the number of viewers,” YouTube’s message reads, and then advises visitors to subscribe to the channel “to help this creator reach a broader audience.” No word, though, on whether...

On January 5, 2022, we’re updating our Terms of Service (“Terms”) to help clarify and make it easier to understand what to expect as you use the service. These changes won’t affect the way you use YouTube. You can review a summary of the changes and the updated Terms here.

America has lost a voice that strongly and consistently provided the road map to steer us away from the political and cultural abyss we currently face. That voice belonged to historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died Dec. 30 at age 97. Gertrude spoke passionately about how our most important institutions—families, communities, churches, and private enterprise—must be “remoralized,” as it is only through a strong civil society that we can have a strong nation. In her words, people learn to function as “free, responsible, moral adults” in these institutions and apply that responsibility and morality as citizens of a nation. But she...

Facebook's massive, secret rulebook for policing speech reveals inconsistencies, gaps and biases... A Message from Yahoo Search What is psoriatic arthritis? Look for symptoms, causes & more What is psoriatic arthritis? Look for symptoms, causes & more The rulebook's details were revealed Thursday night thanks to a Facebook employee who leaked over 1,400 pages of the speech policing rulebook to the Times because he "feared that the company was exercising too much power, with too little oversight — and making too many mistakes."

If Twitter hasn’t suspended or banned you yet, don’t feel relieved. You may be next. When Twitter and other big tech companies started banning fringy rightwing characters over the past year or so, few people objected, because even most conservatives weren’t sympathetic to those purged. It’s hard to feel sympathy for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. But once the radicals were banned, it became far easier to ban others. Now, people tend to talk about public issues mostly on the big tech platforms. Minority viewpoints can use them to get around the mainstream or legacy media. A biased article in The...

John Thornton is CEO of Astrobotic Technology. He contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. When the XPRIZE Foundation announced the Google Lunar XPRIZE in 2007, Astrobotic Technology chairman Red Whittaker declared his intention to compete on the first day. Since then, we have worked methodically on the technology and operations for the $20 million Grand Prize. We have approached this from the outset as an opportunity to build a business. With only a few lunar landings since Apollo, there remains a deep cultural belief that they are extraordinarily difficult and expensive. Bold, risky pursuits are called...

Golden Spike has detailed plans for a lunar return using existing assets. The recent successful Spacex flights are improving the viability of Golden Spike and its plans to return to the moon before 2020. Golden Spike estimates that they could repeat Apollo 11 for about $6.4 billion and make repeated manned trips to the moon for about $1.5 billion for each trip. Here are the budgets of different space agencies.

As several new private ventures to take people on trips to space come closer to becoming reality, California lawmakers are racing other states to woo the new space companies with cushy incentives. They are debating a bill now in Sacramento that would insulate manufacturers of spaceships and parts suppliers from liability should travelers get injured or killed on a voyage, except in cases such as gross negligence or intentional wrongdoing. Last year, the state enacted a law that shields space tourism companies such as Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic from similar lawsuits. “We’re still in the fledgling part of space...

With corporate profits at record levels and stocks regaining the ground lost during the financial crisis, Wall Street anxiously anticipates the return of the individual investors to equity markets. It may be a long wait, because the little guy may have concluded stocks are a sucker’s bet. Investors, as opposed to traders, buy stocks in companies whose profits they expect to rise. The conventional wisdom says stock prices will follow profits up, but over the last two business cycles, that simply has not happened. In March 2000, the S&P 500 first closed above 1500. Since corporate profits are up 135...

MOJAVE, Calif. (AP) -- Virgin Galactic says it expects to make rocket-powered test flights of its passenger spaceship later this year. The company said Wednesday its spaceship builder partner has been granted an experimental permit from the Federal Aviation Administration - a move that will allow it to proceed with powered flights.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveils the Falcon Heavy rocket at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, April 5, 2011. Private US company SpaceX hopes to put an astronaut on Mars within 10 to 20 years, Musk has said.Private US company SpaceX hopes to put an astronaut on Mars within 10 to 20 years, the head of the firm said."We'll probably put a first man in space in about three years," Elon Musk told the Wall Street Journal Saturday. "We're going all the way to Mars, I think... best case 10 years, worst case 15 to 20 years." SpaceX is...

To date, Iridium NEXT is the largest commercial space launch contract with any single entity. All total, the contract is worth an estimated $3 billion. As part of that Iridium Communications Inc. signed into a deal with Space Explorations Technologies (SpaceX) as its major launch provider of its communications satellites on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The manner in which the Iridium NEXT family of satellites is launched will be a dramatic departure from how Iridium launched its first suite of satellites back in the 90s.

Bigelow Aerospace has designed a larger, heavier, and more capable expandable space station module, or interplanetary human transport module The BA 2100 would have a 2100 cubic meter volume and the BA 330 has a 330 cubic meter volume. The International space station has an internal volume of 1,000 cubic meters. The weight of the module could be as low as 70 tonnes (150,000 lb) but for the BA-2100 would more likely be "in the range of 100 metric tonnes", and is substantially larger than the BA 330, with the docking ends of the module alone estimated at approximately 25...

Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful rocket, represents SpaceX’s entry into the heavy lift launch vehicle category. With the ability to carry satellites or interplanetary spacecraft weighing over 53 metric tons (117,000 lb) to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Falcon Heavy can lift nearly twice the payload of the next closest vehicle, the US Space Shuttle, and more than twice the payload of the Delta IV Heavy.

Click here to find out more! In "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity," I bet my readers $1,000 that they couldn't name one thing that government does better than the private sector. I am yet to pay. Free enterprise does everything better. Why? Because if private companies don't do things efficiently, they lose money and die. Unlike government, they cannot compel payment through the power to tax. Even when a private company operates a public facility under contract to government, it must perform. If it doesn't, it will be "fired" -- its contract won't be renewed. Government is never fired. Contracting...

We learned again in the president’s speech on the BP disaster this week that all of our interests in the energy sphere are aligned: Move from carbon-based fuel to renewables and we’ll create American jobs, heal the climate, put more distance between us and geopolitically unstable regions and punish those nasty oil companies while saving our shrimp and seagulls. Win-win-win-win-win. Except the president’s beloved (if doomed) cap-and-trade legislation would: do little or nothing to alter global climate trends, reward oil companies like BP that backed the bill from the start, destroy jobs by increasing the cost gap with coal-powered China...

<p>Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.</p> <p>Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.</p>

SpaceX has announced the payload for the first Falcon 9 launch later this year will be a stripped-down version of the company's own Dragon capsule, a vehicle being developed to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. In an update on the company's Web site, SpaceX said the demonstration launch would provide "valuable aerodynamic and performance data" for future Dragon test flights under the umbrella of NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services and Commercial Resupply Services programs. The payload is called the Dragon spacecraft qualification unit, a vehicle originally built only for ground testing to verify the spacecraft's myriad of systems...

LONDON (Reuters) - Long-haul trips could be made in spaceships instead of planes in 20 years' time if Virgin's efforts to commercialize space travel succeed, the president of Virgin Galactic told Reuters in an interview. Will Whitehorn said Virgin's plans to take tourists into space were just a first stage that could open up a range of possibilities for the company including space science, computer server farms in space and replacing long-haul flights. Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson's Virgin Group, has collected $40 million in deposits from would-be space tourists including physicist Stephen Hawking and ex-racing driver Niki Lauda,...

Whatever one thinks of the ethics of using human embryos in medical research, the rhetoric around President Barack Obama's decision to expand federal funding for embryonic stem-cell science reveals a widespread misconception of how medical products are created. Many of the same political leaders who are the strongest champions for federally funded research seek to impose myriad restrictions, regulations, and economic controls on the private companies that translate public science into practical medical innovations. As a result, while Mr. Obama's stem-cell decision only affects federal funding, and while more funding will mean more research, it's far from certain that this...