Free Republic

Sheriff Joe Arpaio is calling on Arizona's 250,000 concealed weapons permit holders to fight terrorism in the homeland. On Dec. 1, one day before 14 died in a San Bernadino, California massacre involving 28-year-old Syed Farook, the man known as the "toughest sheriff in America" said he could not guarantee the public's safety and said legally armed citizens should take matters into their own hands if necessary. "I'm just talking about the areas where you have large crowds and someone pulls out the gun and starts shooting. Maybe somebody with a concealed weapon takes the guy down," the Maricopa County...

NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission is still gasping along, but at least one space blogger suggests that its cancellation is all but inevitable. In the meantime, Space News just on Tuesday reported that the space agency has decided that the ARM must actually capture a boulder and take it to a retrograde lunar orbit to be considered a success. This metric was actually in doubt, with some NASA managers suggesting that as long as an unmanned probe, propelled by a solar selection propulsion engine, rendezvoused with an asteroid and then returned, even without anything resembling a rock, it would be a...

A man fitted with a mechanical arm goes about demonstrating how it works--with mixed (and hilarious) results.

In covering the hearing of the nine bank chief executives on Capitol Hill, it didn’t take long for me to see that Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was having a hard time of it, valiant effort though he did make to defend his bank’s lending practices. Because to look inside Wells Fargo, you will find the worst of the mortgage lenders housed in this bank, Wachovia, which Wells Fargo bought last fall for $15.4 bn, and housed within Wachovia is Golden West Financial, which Wachovia bought for a stupefying $25 bn, Golden West, the purveyor of some of the worst...

The House on Wednesday approved President Obama’s plan to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels to counter the growing threat of the Islamic State terrorist organization even though lawmakers in both parties remain deeply skeptical about its chances for success.

***************** AMD has just announced their Opteron roadmap for 2014-2016 at the Core Innovation conference which unveils the upcoming Project Skybridge and K12 architecture based family of APUs and SOCs. The new roadmap reveals the ambidextrous design framework which brings computing to several form factors in the dense server market.AMD Announces 2014-2016 Roadmap – 20nm Project SkyBridge The Project Skybridge is AMD’s next generation ambidextrous computing architecture that allows x86 Cores and ARM cores to be pin-to-pin compatible allowing the motherboard to run off both SOCs and APUs. The Project Sky-Bridge will feature the new family of APUs and SOCs...

Around 15 months ago, AMD announced that it would be building 64-bit ARM based SoCs for servers in 2014. Less than a month into 2014, AMD made good on its promise and officially announced the Opteron A1100: a 64-bit ARM Cortex A57 based SoC. The Opteron A1100 features either 4 or 8 AMD Cortex A57 cores. There's only a single die mask so we're talking about harvested die to make up the quad-core configuration. My guess is over time we'll see that go away entirely, but since we're at very early stages of talking about the A1100 there's likely...

Rand Paul in May, proven correct later in August...

The 10 year Treasury yield has risen 77% since May 2nd. ust10081913a And mortgage rates (Bankrate 30yr Fixed-rate) are up 32% since May 2nd. t10b30081913 As refinancing volumes plummet, lenders are trying to extend the home financing boom by pitching adjustable-rate mortgages to borrowers, harkening back to the pre-crisis boom years. Applications for adjustable-rate loans now make up 6% of mortgage loan requests, up from 3% at the beginning of the year, though still well below the 32% peak in 2004, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Choosing an adjustable-rate mortgage would seem counterintuitive when interest rates are rising. But...

ARM SoCs are set to be speed cranked next year as both TSMC and GlobalFoundries have revealed they plan to release chips running at 3GHz sometime in 2014. Phys.org reports that the current fastest ARM chips are clocked at about 2.3GHz, and most are around 1.6GHz, so the new chips should provide quite a bit more oomph.Both TSMC and GlobalFoundries will be moving their chip making process to 20nm, down from the current smallest scale they can work on which is 28nm. As well as allowing the manufacturers to make faster chips without extra cooling considerations, the process shrink...

Yesterday in An Khe Village, my father reunited with his old friend, Nguyen Quang Hung, who he hadn't seen in 45 years. The story is one for the history books, one that will certainly touch hearts around the world. But, nobody was more touched than Mr. Hung, my father (Samuel Axelrad), and the respective children, siblings, and grandchildren who were there to witness this once-in-a-lifetime reunion. I am sitting in the Quy Nhon airport as we speak. I couldn't wait to get back to Hanoi to write about the events of yesterday. For those of you who don't know the...

Earth's Milky Way Neighborhood Gets More Respect Old picture: Local Arm a small "spur" of Milky Way. New picture: Local Arm probable major branch of Perseus Arm. CREDIT: Robert Hurt, IPAC; Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF. Our Solar System's Milky Way neighborhood just went upscale. We reside between two major spiral arms of our home galaxy, in a structure called the Local Arm. New research using the ultra-sharp radio vision of the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) indicates that the Local Arm, previously thought to be only a small spur, instead is much more like the adjacent major arms,...

Banning gun-free zones and allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons could help eliminate mass shootings at schools, gun-control expert John R. Lott told Newsmax in an exclusive interview Saturday. Lott, an author and college professor, told Newsmax that gun-free zones become “a magnet” for deranged killers who hope to burn their names into the history books by running up a big body count. Lott’s landmark book "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws" is in its 3rd edition. He told Newsmax there is a “very good chance” the Connecticut school shooting could have been averted, if teachers...

  To get full profile OpenCL 1.1 conformance ARM has submitted its Mali-T604 GPU to Khronos in order to get Full Profile OpenCL 1.1 conformance, bringing desktop GPU computing features to the mobile, embedded and smart-TV markets. ARM is actually the first GPU supplier to submit its GPU for Full Profile OpenCL conformance with Khronos, an organization that handles Full Profile and embedded profile OpenCL 1.1 certification. According to ARM, GPU computing is a growing trend that uses the performance of the GPU in order to augment the CPU for certain applications where the GPU is more effective thus providing...

India developing radar-destroying Anti-Radiation Missile After the success of Agni-V project, India is developing an Anti-Radiation Missile (ARM) which can hugely multiply the strike capabilities by destroying the enemy's advance warning system. Production of the ARM, which are among the most advanced missiles, is being undertaken on priority basis by the Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL), which specialises in the missile development. Such missiles can be mounted on Sukhoi fighter planes Su-30 MKI, 140 of which have already been acquired by India from Russia and around 100 more are expected to be delivered in due course of time. These...

BELLINGHAM, Wash. (CBS Seattle) — A Washington man loses his arm from a homemade guillotine. The guillotine unexpectedly dropped on his shoulder Thursday morning at a camp he was living at, severing his arm. He left the arm behind after the accident and rushed to Bellingham Urology Specialists.

Iran Succeeds in Optimizing Range, Precision Targeting of Anti-Radar Missiles TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian Air Force Lieutenant Commander Brigadier General Hossein Chitforoush, the spokesperson of the 'Fadaeeyan-e Harim-e Vellayat III' air drills underway in Northwestern Iran, announced on Thursday that the country's experts have managed to boost the range and the precision capability of the anti-radar missiles fired by Sukhoi-24 fighter jets. "One of the most important actions taken in these drills was increasing the range of the anti-radar missiles mounted on Sukhoi-24 fighters," Chitforoush told reporters on Thursday, adding that the missiles have been fired and "hit the specified targets...

California must put an immediate halt to work on its cap and trade program until it completes a review of alternative approaches to reducing climate change, a state judge said Friday. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ernest Goldsmith ruled in March that the California Air Resources Board failed to conduct such a review but left open the question of whether the agency could conduct rule-making, environmental studies or do any other work while the legal issues were being resolved. The state said at the time that it would appeal. On Friday, Goldsmith enjoined the ARB from "engaging in any cap...

The Obama administration is engaged in a fierce debate over whether to supply weapons to the rebels in Libya, senior officials said on Tuesday, with some fearful that providing arms would deepen American involvement in a civil war and that some fighters may have links to Al Qaeda. The debate has drawn in the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon, these officials said, and has prompted an urgent call for intelligence about a ragtag band of rebels who are waging a town-by-town battle against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, from a base in eastern Libya long suspected of supplying terrorist...

Big GHz fight in 2011 Qualcomm has decided to show its dual Scorpion based MSM8x60 mobile CPU and it also told the world that this CPU can hit 1.2GHz, per core that is. The chip has an Adreno 220 GPU that we know little about and of course its a 45nm chip since 28nm should be only ready in the latter part of 2011. The chip should be able to do high definition stereoscopic 3D video, and multi-party video conferencing as well as some nice gaming. It is intended for tablets and phones and you can bet that you will...