Free Republic

20 years since Y2K. Never met anyone that built a bomb shelter, but do remember the tension that night as the clocks around the world ticked over. https://www.documentjournal.com/2019/12/y2k-20-years-later-documents-contributors-recall-the-armageddon-that-never-was/

-snip- my love of farms and farming never went away, and in 1999, I purchased my paternal grandfather’s 130-hectare (320-acre) property, Pinehurst Farm, which had been out of the family for 55 years. I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d do with the place, but by the time I retired in 2007, there was more and more talk about climate change due to human-caused carbon emissions. I knew that agriculture has a large carbon footprint, and I wondered if there was a way to make farming more sustainable. -snip- I recalled a conversation I’d had with my dad and his friend,...

A door blew off a Boeing 777X as the new plane was undergoing what was supposed to be its final structural inspection by federal regulators. The test is meant to push the plane beyond its limits. Engineers had the plane pressurized and on the ground. They loaded it up well beyond capacity and bent its wings in an extreme manner, in a way almost certain to never happen in the real world. As the ground test was underway and as engineers and FAA inspectors watched, a door blew off the plane. Sources tell KOMO there was a stunned silence after...

Cyber-assistant taught to duck sensitive topics Apple has programmed its Siri voice assistant to avoid politically charged subjects, and deflect or duck questions that require its AI to take a stand on issues, it emerged this week. From a tranche of documents leaked by a former contract worker who evaluated Siri responses to user questions for accuracy, The Guardian obtained a set of guidelines drawn up last year to ensure Siri's responses to "sensitive" topics comes across as neutral. In keeping with these guidelines, Siri's responses were revised to endorse "equality" while avoiding the word "feminism," even if asked directly....

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SEATTLE — In the days after the first crash of Boeing’s 737 Max, engineers at the Federal Aviation Administration came to a troubling realization: They didn’t fully understand the automated system that helped send the plane into a nose-dive, killing everyone on board. Engineers at the agency scoured their files for information about the system designed to help avoid stalls. They didn’t find much. Regulators had never independently assessed the risks of the dangerous software known as MCAS when they approved the plane in 2017. More than a dozen current and former employees at the F.A.A. and Boeing who spoke...

China has reportedly developed an over-the-horizon maritime early warning radar system that its creator claims can detect stealth aircraft far beyond visual range, an advanced capability that could threaten US fifth-generation fighters operating in the area. Liu Yongtan, the team leader for the radar project, told Chinese media his high-frequency surface wave radar emits "high frequency electromagnetic waves with long wavelengths and wide beams" that travel along the surface of the sea, the Global Times reported Monday, citing a recent interview with Naval and Merchant Ships magazine. The radar system, part of China's ongoing efforts to prevent a sneak attack...

Eluding radar, quietly sailing into enemy territory and launching long-range precision attacks from less-detectable positions all begin to paint the picture of how a “stealthy” offensive surface destroyers could transform modern maritime warfare. Can a massive surface destroyer, armed with Tomahawk missiles, deck-mounted guns, sensors, antennas and heat-generating onboard electrical power, truly be considered stealthy? Surely, tall, vertical masts, hull-mounted sensors and protruding antenna could never be a low-observable ship, yet performing these missions comprised the technical starting point from which engineers launched into building a first-of-its-kind stealth warship. Stealth attributes are just one of a number of defining characteristics...

NEW YORK (AP) — Are the female voices behind Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa amplifying gender bias around the world? The United Nations thinks so. A report released Wednesday by the UN's culture and science organization raises concerns about what it describes as the "hardwired subservience" built into default female-voiced assistants operated by Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The report is called "I'd Blush If I Could." It's a reference to an answer Apple's Siri gives after hearing sexist insults from users. It says it's a problem that millions of people are getting accustomed to commanding female-voiced assistants that are...

4' Broadcasters and Analysts during the Collegiate Esports Championship. PHOTO BY PHIL ELLSWORTH / ESPN IMAGES Wrapping Up the ESPN Collegiate Esports Championships at Comicpalooza CARLOS BRANDON | MAY 13, 2019 | 5:30AM Comicpalooza and ESPN brought the inaugural Collegiate Esports Championships to Houston with a spectacular live studio arena and a Twitch stream viewed by thousands. The event was the first of its kind and the first major esports tournament hosted by ESPN's recently developed esports division. Over three days of match play, collegiate champions were crowned in five titles: Overwatch, Hearthstone, Star Craft II, Heroes of the Storm,...

NEW YORK/SEOUL – Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said it has received “a few” reports of damage to the displays of samples of its upcoming foldable smartphone, raising the prospect of a less-then-smooth entry for the splashy $1,980 handset. The Galaxy Fold, on sale from April 26 in the United States, resembles a conventional smartphone but opens like a book to reveal a second display the size of a small tablet at 7.3 inches (18.5 cm). The design, matched by Huawei Technologies Co Ltd’s Mate X, was hailed as the future in a field that has seen few surprises since Apple...

AMAZON is listening to customers through Alexa devices - with employees recording thousands of clips including a woman singing in the shower and a sex assault, it emerged last night. Full-time workers and contractors at the online retail giant reportedly sift through as many as 1,000 recordings per shift - and even share "amusing" clips between themselves.

Tespa’s Overwatch Collegiate Championship has been well underway for several months now. Back in January, a crowded field of over 500 participating teams with over 4,500 players began to thin down to the final 16 teams that we had at the start of this past week. On Tuesday and Wednesday, that field thinned down to the final eight teams, set to play one another at a LAN event in Houston, TX. The exact date for the quarterfinals is listed as May 10 on the Tespa website, although no official announcement has been made to confirm this. Each of these Round...

February 20, 2019 America’s STEM Crisis Threatens Our National Security By Arthur Herman On October 4, 1957, a steel sphere the size of a beach ball and bristling with four radio antennae circled the Earth in eight minutes. Dubbed “Satellite-1,” or “PS-1” (Prosteyshiy Sputnik-1) by its Soviet fabricators, it was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviets had launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit, where it stayed for three weeks before its batteries died. Then it continued silently in a decaying orbit for another two months before burning up in the atmosphere. Its radio signal pulses were easily...

"Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked. Suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which everything could be linked to everything." – Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web In 1989 the world’s largest physics laboratory, CERN, was a hive of ideas and information stored on multiple incompatible computers. Tim Berners-Lee envisioned a unifying structure for linking information across different computers, and wrote a proposal in March 1989 called “Information Management: A Proposal”. By 1991 this vision of universal connectivity had become the World Wide Web.

Co-founder of environmental organization Greenpeace Patrick Moore said Tuesday that the climate change crisis driving much of liberal politics today “is not only fake news. It’s fake science.” Moore also wondered during his appearance on “Fox & Friends” why people would be worried about global warming: “A little bit of warming would not be a bad thing, for myself being Canadian.” Moore bounced back into the climate change debate last week in an online feud with New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after he blasted her Green New Deal for being not ambitious but ridiculous. “Well, it’s a silly plan;...

Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook Inc. The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps...

Combined companies will offer endpoint security with built-in cloud backup. The data backup and storage company Carbonite has announced that it has acquired endpoint security provider Webroot for $618m. The deal will allow Carbonite to combine the strengths of both companies to provide customers with automated cloud security software that has emergency backup already built in.

Without consulting with its users, Microsoft has installed an establishment media browser extension, purportedly designed to rate the accuracy of news websites, as a default setting on mobile versions of its Edge browser. In practice, it creates a news blacklist by warning users away from sites including Breitbart News, The Drudge Report, and the Daily Mail. The browser extension, called “Newsguard,” presents users with a red warning label if they navigate to a website that it judges to be unreliable. A “green” rating is given to websites that NewsGuard considers trustworthy. A number of pro-Trump websites, including Breitbart News, are...

A fire Sunday morning in Northwest Washington, D.C., damaged studios for Fox News, C-SPAN and MSNBC, and forced "Fox News Sunday" to relocate its broadcast to a local affiliate's studio. D.C. Fire and EMS tweeted that an electrical fire broke out in the 8th floor television studio but nobody was injured. Steve Scully, the political editor for C-SPAN, tweeted shortly after 7 a.m. that the Fox News and C-SPAN studios sustained "extensive damage," and MSNBC's studio took on "extensive smoke and water damage."