Free Republic

Yesterday, I asked readers how they felt about setting up independent commissions to handle redistricting in each state. Commenter Mitch Beales wrote: "It seems to me that an 'independent panel' is about as likely as politicians redistricting themselves out of office. This is the twenty-first century. How hard can it be to create an algorithm to draw legislative districts after each census?" Reader "BobMunck" agreed: "Why do people need to be involved in mapping the districts?" They're right. These programs and algorithms already exist. Brian Olson is a software engineer in Massachusetts who wrote a program to draw "optimally compact"...

Full Title: Now Google is going to dominate space: Search giant to launch 180 satellites to provide internet access for the ENTIRE planet, sources claim The world wide web may seem like a global community, but two-thirds of the planet still remain without access. Now, Google is planning to change this by launching a fleet of 180 satellites to provide web access for the 4.8 billion people not yet online, according to sources close to the company. The California-based giant will spend more than $1 billion (£600 million) on the technology, which will rival Facebook’s efforts to connect remote regions...

Owners of iPhones and iPads have been targeted by a hacker who is freezing iOS devices and demanding a ransom of up to £55 to unlock them. ... "I went to check my phone and there was a message on the screen (it's still there) saying that my device(s) had been hacked by 'Oleg Pliss' and he/she/they demanded $100 USD/EUR (sent by paypal to lock404(at)hotmail.com) to return them to me. ... "Such scams have been around for years. By using the credentials to access an Apple iCloud account, the attackers can enable the 'Find My iPhone' service - this is...

The popular notion that urine is sterile is a myth, new research finds. Yes, the myth that comes up every time someone pees in a pool (or drinking water reservoir) is actually false. In fact, bacteria do live in urine, Loyola University researchers reported this week at the general meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston. "We need to reassess everything we think we know about urine," study researcher Evann Hilt, a graduate student at Loyola, told Live Science.

Inspired by fictional cyborgs like Terminator, a team of researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh has made the first bionic particles from semiconductors and proteins. "These design principles can be used to guide future designs for other bionic systems, starting from the primary building blocks of biological organisms and inorganic machines," Kotov said. "It is very possible that Terminator of the future would need to be constructed starting from such building blocks."

On Sunday May 19th, storm chasers captured a low precipitation (LP) supercell near Newcastle, Wyoming. A supercell is a thunderstorm that is associated with a mesocyclone, which is a deep, persistently rotating updraft. Supercell thunderstorms can persist for many hours and are responsible for nearly all of the significant tornadoes produced in the U.S.

Still using email? You might already be behind the curve. Despite the fact that the Defense Department is well into a broad transition to defense enterprise email – with the Army fully migrated, the Air Force partially moved and several Pentagon executive offices on board – at least one top defense official believes email is on its way out. However, that does not mean it’s already known what comes after email. “I’m not sure what the medium is going to be, that’s what we’ve got to build now,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronnie Hawkins, director of the Defense Information...

Scientists in the Philippines have discovered a plant that can absorb large amounts of metal without itself being poisoned, a species called the Rinorea niccolifera, that can be used to clean up polluted soils and harvest commercially viable metals. The plant is one of only 450 species, known as hyperaccumulator plants, of 300,000 known vascular plants that can absorb significant amounts of metal though their roots. The lead researcher and author of a new study on the plant, Professor Edwino Fernando, from the University of the Philippines, said the leaves of the Rinorea niccolifera can absorb up to 18,000 parts...

In the Gilded Age, wrenching economic and technological change hardened life for the vast majority of Americans while an elite few prospered. Innovators like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt disrupted old industries, creating news ones, and cemented their fortunes via government-approved monopolies. The most pernicious of these were railroad trusts. In our times, wrenching economic and technological change hardens life for the vast majority of Americans while an elite few prosper. Innovators like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg disrupt old industries, create news ones and ….

Internet application and content companies, what some refer to as “edge providers,” are increasingly concerned by the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) newfound ability to regulate the Internet, and rightfully so.

A computer expert from eastern Germany claims to have hacked the homepage of the US National Security Agency (NSA), leaving a message on the site for American security experts. Matthias Ungethüm from Saxony said on Friday he had replaced the NSA slogan “Codebreakers and Codemakers” with the German phrase “Durchleuchten Sie Ihre Homepage”—“Examine your homepage" on the website of America’s security agency. …

The White House has asked legislators crafting competing reforms of the National Security Agency to provide legal immunity for telecommunications firms that provide the government with customer data, the Guardian has learned. In a statement of principles privately delivered to lawmakers some weeks ago to guide surveillance reforms, the White House said it wanted legislation protecting “any person who complies in good faith with an order to produce records” from legal liability for complying with court orders for phone records to the government once the NSA no longer collects the data in bulk. The brief request, contained in a four-page...

Graphene trilayers can be stacked in two different configurations, which can occur naturally in the same flake. They are separated by a sharp boundary. (Image: Pablo San-Jose ICMM-CSI) A team of researchers has discovered how to change the crystal structure of graphene, a finding that could lead to smaller and faster microprocessors.A University of Arizona-led team of physicists has discovered how to change the crystal structure of graphene, more commonly known as pencil lead, with an electric field, an important step toward the possible use of graphene in microprocessors that would be smaller and faster than current, silicon-based technology.Graphene consists...

This is an advance notification for one out-of-band security bulletin that Microsoft is intending to release on May 1, 2014. The bulletin addresses the security vulnerability in Internet Explorer described in Microsoft Security Advisory 2963983.

Apple has determined that the sleep/wake button mechanism on a small percentage of iPhone 5 models may stop working or work intermittently. iPhone 5 models manufactured through March 2013 may be affected by this issue. Apple will replace the sleep/wake button mechanism, free of charge, on iPhone 5 models that exhibit this issue and have a qualifying serial number. The sleep/wake button is located on the top of your iPhone 5:

Technological change is not a tide that lifts all boats in our economy. The truth is that it’s more like a tsunami. It threatens to overturn all the boats and drown their occupants, sparing only the lucky few who have already reached safety in the hills. That’s the kind of admission you won’t often see here in the pages of Xconomy. The X in our name, after all, stands for exponential, a reference to the stunning pace of technological progress and economic growth over the past 75 years—growth attributable largely to advances in computer hardware and software and the organizational...

After weeks of deliberation, a committee is poised to make a final recommendation Thursday on what to do with Oregon’s botched health insurance exchange portal. The technology committee will decide whether Cover Oregon should ditch its glitch-filled website and replace it with the federal government’s health insurance marketplace, or try to fix the existing system with the help of a new IT contractor. The decision comes nearly seven months after Oregon’s exchange was supposed to go live so that residents could use it to compare and buy health insurance plans. Cover Oregon’s website is seen as the worst of the...

The founder of Russia’s leading social media network—a wunderkind often described as Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg—has left his post as CEO and fled the country as cronies of President Vladimir Putin have made steady inroads into the company’s ownership. The slow-motion ouster of Pavel Durov from the network known as VKontakte, or “In Contact,” is the latest sign that independent media outlets in Russia have become increasingly imperiled. Although months in the making, the loss of Durov’s leadership in VKontakte means that the space for free speech on the Russian web could shrink even further. …

Usually, the Internal Revenue Service is the one getting paid this time of year, but Uncle Sam will be lining someone else's pockets this tax season because of its attachment to Windows XP. In case you hadn't heard, support for XP officially stopped on April 8th, meaning that Microsoft will no longer provide support or security updates for the venerable OS. However, governmental computers can't be left vulnerable, so the IRS will be paying Microsoft millions of dollars for custom support to keep their machines secure and functional. Right now, over half the agency's PCs still run XP...

Researchers have uncovered an extremely critical vulnerability in recent versions of OpenSSL, a technology that allows millions of Web sites to encrypt communications with visitors. Complicating matters further is the release of a simple exploit that can be used to steal usernames and passwords from vulnerable sites, as well as private keys that sites use to encrypt and decrypt sensitive data.