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Thermal imaging devices have been available for sale online, relatively cheaply, for at least a couple of years. But now, an iPhone attachment will let you carry a thermal imaging camera in your pocket. FLIR Systems, a specialized camera company, plans to release its thermal camera and app for iPhone for less than $350 this spring. These devices — which show you the image of what you are looking at but with colors highlighting heat levels from objects — are getting easy to own and use. And that means consumers could use them to spot a water leak in the...

America's most popular cable news host is upset. "Marijuana use, video games and texting (are) creating major social problems," says Bill O'Reilly. "This is an epidemic that will lead to a weaker nation!" Give me a break. Crotchety old geezers always complain about "the kids." The Boston Globe frets about "Idle Trophy Kids." The New York Post asks if millennials are "The Worst Generation?" Older folks (my age) complain that young people spend so much time texting each other that they can't communicate. And because they spend hours playing violent video games, violence is up. Bunk. It's true that...

President Obama signed off Monday on a controversial civilian nuclear deal with Vietnam. The cooperation agreement with the communist nation allows the U.S. to sell nuclear fuel and technology to its former foe. It aims to help guarantee Vietnams' energy independence as China asserts a more prominent role in the region. “I have determined that the performance of the Agreement will promote, and will not constitute an unreasonable risk to, the common defense and security,” Obama wrote in a memo for the secretaries of State and Energy. The deal aims to get Vietnam to import the fuel it needs for...

Amnesty is being driven, among others, by big businesses claiming they cannot hire enough high-tech professionals. These are (or posture as) major donors to members of Congress. So these businesses are twisting arms on Capitol Hill. The compromise is that Democrats get amnesty for illegal aliens if business gets more high-tech foreign workers. However, in fact, there is no shortage of high-tech professionals in the USA. Businesses do not need immigration reform. On August 30, 2013, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers published a review of this question in its journal Spectrum, titled "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth."...

President likes to refer to us as grown children and is quick to boast that because of his ObamaCare plan we can stay on our parents’ health insurance plans until we’re 26. But this is a generation that remembers typing papers on word processors and tearing the edges off dot matrix paper. We weren’t the first on the information super highway but once we got a license, we took over the road. Facebook has tracked every day of our lives since college and Twitter turned us into citizen reporters. We also have degrees – some of us multiple degrees- but...

Don’t mock the beleaguered Nook owner. That could have been you. Five years ago, when the nation’s largest chain of bookstores released an e-reader that it promised would best Amazon’s Kindle, could you blame the poor souls who bought in to Barnes & Noble’s vision of the future? In 2011, Consumer Reports proclaimed the Nook the best e-reader in the land, saying it surpassed the Kindle in just about every way. Well, that sounds pretty definitive, doesn’t it? No wonder your aunt bought you one for Christmas. Things haven’t played out well since. After failing to douse Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes...

The solar energy industry is still in the process of exploring how to make photovoltaic panels more efficient and less intrusive, and researchers at Stanford have already pushed forward with peel-and-stick solar panels. However, for high power usage the devices must be large and in direct contact with the sun at all times, meaning they need to track its position in the sky using sensors and equipment that are expensive and susceptible to bad weather. Currently seeking funding through Indiegogo, Rawlemon is an alternative in the shape of an oddly beautiful eyeball-shaped lens, that uses refraction to concentrate sunlight with...

Some tech industry heavyweights took to Twitter on Monday to vent their frustration with the user-unfriendly state of television in the broadband Internet age. The conversation pointed out the conflicts between the freedom to chose that users crave and the content gatekeepers who are reluctant to change from business as usual. BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield documented the Twitter conversation in a blog post Tuesday. It started when Jason Hirschhorn, CEO of Redef, complained about the cost of cable and what he received in return. "It's amazing to me that I pay a cable company $250/month and I can't view all...

I started programming when I was 5, first with Logo and then BASIC. The picture above is me, age 9 (with horrible posture). By the time this photo was taken, I had already written several BASIC games that I distributed as shareware on our local BBS. I was fast growing bored, so my parents (both software engineers) gave me the original dragon compiler textbook from their grad school days. That's when I started learning C and writing my own simple interpreters and compilers. My early interpreters were for BASIC, but by the time I entered high school I had...

Israel's Defense Ministry, long suspected of supplying arms to dictatorial regimes and illegal organizations, has refused to divulge the full list of its weapons customers despite what the one analyst calls "serious failures that have recently been revealed in its export control department." ...snip... The controversy was heightened by the surprise resignation in December of Meir Shalit, head of the ministry's Defense Export Control Agency, after a joint U.S.-Israel investigation found that a highly sensitive Israeli-produced electronic system licensed for sale to a French firm had been transferred to China

A Swedish hunter has provided new insight into how to open a bottle of beer – by shooting its cap off with a shotgun. Carlsberg-loving Anders Rodenberg uploaded a video to YouTube showing him perform the dangerous stunt. ‘Real men drink beer,’ he says in the clip, before holding the bottle of Carlsberg at arms-length and firing the shotgun, blowing off the lid. Video: Man uses a shotgun to open his bottle of beer If Carlsberg made hunters: Anders Rodenberg uses shotgun to open his beer (Picture: YouTube/Anders Rodenberg) He then holds the undamaged glass bottle to the camera adding,...

Todd Blatt is betting that Google Glass will benefit from a few accessories when it is released to the public next year. The first is a camera cap. Already, the 30-year-old 3-D designer has had people shield their face from him while he was wearing his pair of phonesyncing glasses, a sign they don’t trust that he’s not recording them. Blatt, a Baltimorean who also lives in New York, used the crowd-funder Kickstarter to finance GlassKap, a plastic device that fits over the camera lens, and other Google Glass accessories. He scored a pair of the glasses as part of...

1. HealthCare.gov HealthCare.gov has been about as disappointing as it gets. The online exchange for health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) had a litany of problems on day one (Oct. 1): extreme slowness, broken pull-down menus, and information on applications being deleted. The site's performance improved throughout November and December, but only slightly. In the coming months, HealthCare.gov will improve, but such a flawed rollout at a time of unprecedented technology innovation is a stain on President Obama's second term and a letdown we won't soon forget. 2. Dropbox outages and security issues The easy-to-use cloud...

I spend a lot of time worrying about the next tech bubble. It's my job to worry, of course, and this year, worrying became a full-time occupation. Ever since Facebook's stock price rebounded this year to the level of its initial public offering, tech startups have seen an incredible run-up in valuations.

Camille Paglia, the liberal-conservative lesbian who adores men, observed recently that nations must never neglect their basic strengths and survival skills. As she put it, “The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.” Perhaps she was thinking of the United States; this is, after all, a time when the gap between our towering international presumption is being undermined by our crumbling domestic reality. The same Paglia-esque thoughts of political mortality came into Hamilton’s mind when he read the news about the near collision, on December 5, of a US Navy ship and a Chinese...

SURGEONS may soon be able to "draw" new bone, skin and muscle on to patients after scientists created a pen-like device that can apply human cells directly to car-crash victims and others with serious injuries. Australian scientists have made a "BioPen", which allows doctors to apply stem cells and growth factors on to damaged and diseased bones. The machine works in a similar way to a 3D printer, building up the materials required to heal a bone. Experts have said it could improve bone reconstruction surgery. The device was created at the University of Wollongong and St Vincent's Hospital in...

Confession. Credit: catholicrelics.co.uk.. Phoenix, Ariz., Dec 20, 2013 / 02:32 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A Phoenix, Ariz., priest has invented a computer system intended to help Catholics who are deaf, hearing-impaired or speech-impaired to make their confessions. Father Romuald P. Zantua, the system’s inventor, told CBCP News that his invention will help increase the practice of confessions, especially for deaf people who have limited access to priests who know sign language. The website for the system, called St. Damien’s Confession Box, says it is primarily aimed at the deaf and those with speech impediments who may not be able to communicate...

LONG front page stories in the New York Times and in the Washington Post are doing their best "Squirrel!" -- a MSM/White House push to divert focus away from the LAW of Obamacare (aka ACA). Because of the exploding number of Americans angry about what has happened to their rights and their healthcare (a disaster still unfolding with no end in sight) they're working overtime to divert our anger from the destructive law that Democrats and Obama pushed through on a party line vote. The NYT and the WaPo want us angry about government procurement and the selection of Tech...

San Francisco is a great American city. And Google is a great American company. But the two are having some trouble getting along. Last week, anti-eviction protestors surrounded one of Google’s private shuttle buses, which transport employees from their urban homes to the company’s suburban campus, and staged a phony incident in which an alleged Googler unleashed his contempt for the city’s lower orders. Then, just in time for the backlash to the anti-Google backlash, prominent local startup CEO Greg Gopman delivered the real deal in the form of a Facebook rant decrying the San Francisco poor as, in essence,...

2014 is right around the corner. Most of us can look into our crystal balls and see that a handful of tech trends which became big in 2013 will probably get bigger next year: cloud computing, big data, the rise of tablets, the Internet of Things. But market research firm IDC has gone one better by predicting how these trends will unfold next year — and generate billions of dollars. People and companies will spend $2.1 trillion on technology. Worldwide IT spending will grow 5% next year to $2.1 trillion, IDC says. People and companies will buy smartphones and tablets,...