Free Republic

Drywall is going up on new homes in Gothenburg, Nebraska, and it can’t happen fast enough. The small community (pop. 3,448) doesn’t have enough housing to offer workers who are considering moving in. It sounds paradoxical for a region with abundant land, but parts of rural America are facing a housing shortage. It spans the spectrum from low-income families to midlevel professionals. The good news: Washington as well as state governments are focused on the problem. “We were seeing our local businesses lose out on all of the candidates that wanted to come to work in our community but just...

NASA's lunar mobile launcher is one step closer to sending its first spacecraft to the moon. The launcher is now in final testing for Artemis 1 — an uncrewed test trip around the moon of the Orion spacecraft slated for 2020 or so — after making its last solo trip to the Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad 39B on June 27. The launcher will remain at the pad for two months before going inside the nearby Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to join the Orion capsule and its rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS). One day, this same system could...

When a rocket carrying the first module of the International Space Station blasted off from Kazakhstan in November of 1998, NASA officials said that the station would serve as an orbiting home for astronauts and cosmonauts for at least 15 years. It's now been over 18 years that the station has been continuously occupied by people. The place is impressive, with more living space than a six-bedroom house, two bathrooms and a large bay window for looking down at Earth. NASA and its international partners have spent decades and more than $100 billion to make the station a reality. The...

NASA is in final preparation stages for its Artemis 1 moon mission, which will be the first in its Artemis series of missions which intend to return an American man to the Moon, and bring an American woman to the surface of Earth’s natural satellite for the first time. The 335-ft tall mobile launch tower that will send Artemis 1’s Orion capsule to lunar orbit atop a Space Launch System rocket is now on the pad for its last round fo testing before the real thing. NASA’s Artemis 1 mission will fly the Orion crew capsule to space, where it’ll...

In a matter of hours last Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a citizenship question from next year’s census and blocked federal courts from hearing challenges to extreme partisan gerrymandering. Twenty-four hours later, as the reactions continued to pour in, the court made the quiet, but equally seismic, decision to hear a case about President Donald Trump’s decision to end an Obama-era program protecting hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were brought illegally to the United States as children. That case concerning the termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, likely one of the biggest cases the...

The state of Hawaii on Thursday issued a notice to proceed for construction to start on the $1.4 billion Thirty Meter Telescope project on the Big Island after four “unauthorized structures” were removed from the areas near the telescope’s site on the summit of Mauna Kea. Construction on the long-delayed project could start as early as next month, which would be exactly 10 years after the telescope's international board selected the Hawaii site. The state’s agencies involved will work with TMT officials to determine the start date. The notice gives gives the contractors and workers involved in the construction authorization...

“Hans Sauer of BIO said that it is easy to argue—after the heavy lifting of discovery and development has been done and a product has made it to market—that it should not be patented in the public interest. ‘As if innovative products fell from the sky and ought to go directly into the public domain…. It is right to encourage complaints about problems, but we must do so with an appreciation of the system’s longer-term benefits for society.’” Wednesday’s Senate hearing on patent eligibility reform, which began more than 30 minutes late due to votes on the floor, opened with...

Impeachment is presented as a binary choice – but Congress has other options for dealing with perceived presidential offenses, including censure. And in some ways, an unofficial impeachment inquiry has already started. Yes or no: Do you favor impeaching President Donald Trump? That’s the question Democratic politicians around the country are being battered with – at town halls, in fundraisers, during TV interviews. Support for impeachment has been slowly rising among Democrats in Congress, within the large Democratic presidential field, and among the American people. Now that retired special counsel Robert Mueller has spoken publicly about his Trump-Russia investigation, effectively...

“I’ve spent 22 years on the Federal Circuit and nine years since dealing with patent cases and I cannot predict [under the current law] in a given case whether eligibility will be found or not found. If I can’t do it, how can bankers, venture capitalists [and] business executives make reliable predictions and sensible decisions?” – Judge Paul Michel The first of three scheduled hearings in which the Senate IP Subcommittee will hear testimony from a total of 45 witnesses on the subject of patent eligibility law raised many questions. While some read the proposed draft bill released by Congress...

Are you a propagandist? If you write nonfiction intended to persuade, yes, by a broad definition, you almost certainly are. Here are fifty terms for, and definitions of, forms of propaganda, at least one of which such writers will likely employ in a given piece of content. Propaganda (the word is from a New Latin term meaning “propagating,” synonymous in this connotation with publicizing) has been defined as “communication intended to shape perceptions, manipulate cognition, and direct behavior.” That’s a broad definition — a narrower one would limit propaganda to willful, prejudicial manipulation of information — but it helps writers...

“I asked to participate in the 101 Roundtable and was denied access based of the fact that I am ‘media.’ Yet, the tech giants that are rejecting reform are allowed to participate and still engage in a carefully coordinated public relations campaign.” On June 19, it will be five years since the United States Supreme Court issued a decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, 134 S.Ct. 2347 (2014), which significantly changed the way courts and patent examiners evaluated patent eligibility of computer implemented innovation in the United States. While the Supreme Court ostensibly extended the patent eligibility analysis applied...

[***] Instead of spending their offseasons training or vacationing, professional baseball, football, and basketball players once tended to take their place in the traditional workforce. During the 1950s, Brooklyn Dodgers outfielder Carl Furillo ran a Queens deli in the winter, and Hall of Fame New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle sold insurance in the summer. In the 1960s, Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown worked as a sales rep for Pepsi when he wasn’t breaking tackles. A few weeks after Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer shut out the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 2 of the 1966 World Series,...

Patent paperwork details four different portals On the heels of reportage about a Ford dealer meeting where a Bronco prototype took the stage, Motor Trend discovered a Ford patent application for a removable door system. Called "Door with Convertible Scaffolding" (pictured), the patent appears to have got administrative recognition in the U.S. last year, but was filed in Germany and published in January. The drawings show a full door fitted with impact beams that can be removed from the door casing. A person could take off the full doors and reinstall the impact beams — similar to the tube doors...

LG has been granted US patent 10,254,863, as noted by Let’s Go Digital, which sets out one potential vision for foldable phones — and it involves a mostly transparent display. Filed in 2015, this patent is just a hint at how long tech companies have been mulling foldables, as well as how weird and outlandish their concepts have been. The idea with this one is that you’d have one half of the device with an adjustable transparency, with the other half having some transparent portion and an opaque section to accommodate its battery. As usual with patents, the why of...

<p>Washington — President Trump recognized the chief opposition leader in Venezuela, National Assembly President Juan Guaido, as the country's legitimate interim president. The rare move by the White House comes as large anti-government protests erupted across the South American nation on Wednesday.</p>

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Nicolás Maduro on Wednesday faced the gravest challenge to his authority since assuming power in 2013, as the U.S.-backed opposition claimed the legitimate mantle of leadership, and President Trump promptly recognized him as Venezuela’s interim president. The dramatic developments came as anti-Maduro protests drew hundreds of thousands of people into Venezuelan streets. “Today, I am officially recognizing the President of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Juan Guaido, as the Interim President of Venezuela,” Trump said in a statement. “In its role as the only legitimate branch of government duly elected by the Venezuelan people, the National Assembly...

Full title: "Sherry Knowles Scrutinizes an Activist Supreme Court and its Unconstitutional Approach to Patent Eligibility" “The Supreme Court has brazenly admitted it is not following Congress’ statutory instructions on patent eligibility in several cases. And it has carried out virtually none of the required statutory construction. It is judicial activism in the extreme.”Sherry Knowles is one of the best known patent attorneys you will find. She is a former Vice President and Chief Patent Counsel for GlaxoSmithKline, where she led the charge on behalf of the industry to fight back the claims and continuations rules package the United States...

WHY WE WROTE THIS France’s “yellow vest” protesters have been highly visible, but their motives have been cryptic, thanks in large part to their lack of leaders and structure. We wanted to find out what's driving them. MULHOUSE, FRANCE For Rosa Larocca, a middle-aged headmistress who can switch from a warm smile to a stern look in seconds, it’s all about politics. “The people want a different type of republic and they want [French President Emmanuel] Macron to go,” she says. “What we want are referendums.” For Shanoon Redovanc, a bespectacled retiree sporting a black woolen hat, it’s about living...

Mukhorshibirsky District, Russia - In the south of Buryatia, near the present-day border with Mongolia, there is a mountain-sized rock outcropping known locally as the Merkit Fortress, which looks out over the arid, rolling steppe that gradually fades into the Gobi Desert a few hundred miles away. According to legend, this formidable natural fortification was stormed more than 800 years ago by the forces of a young Mongol warlord who claimed his bride had been stolen by the Merkit tribe, which had made its home base here. He seized the rock, and went on to unite most of the nomadic...

Boston - It was a normal Friday morning in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. Adults were on their way to work, and children were in school. But that ordinary day was about to become extraordinary. Suddenly, a fireball shot across the clear morning sky leaving a thick trail of smoke, accompanied by the sound of a huge explosion. The shock wave knocked people over, shattered glass, and collapsed a factory roof. As many as 1,200 people were injured. A global network of infrasound sensors designed to pick up nuclear explosions calculated that the boom was 30 to 40 times...